Looking At Printmaking: Exploring a Personal, Political and Psychological History through Printmaking
By Erin Goodwin-Guerrero
An artist with boundless energy, Pantea Karimi acknowledges that the journey from one place to the other has been a life-altering experience. For all the contrasts in Karimi’s personal history and life situations, her art is a harmonic play of shapes, seductive colors and photographic images that she often manipulates digitally until they became semi-abstracted. The images are then translated into photo stencils on the silkscreen that allows her to play with size, different color relationships and compositions.
Karimi’s colors are thoughtful and carefully mixed. Her own image may appear in the prints, but the viewer will not necessarily recognize her. Frequently, a prominent female figure in her prints tells us that this is a female narrative. The impression is sometimes playful, sometimes nostalgic, and always hints at her own search for her real and metaphorical place in history.