420 West 14th St.
New York NY 10014
212-414-4014 (ph)
212-414-2636 (fax)

Karen LaMonte, who is best known for her hauntingly beautiful cast glass dresses which explore the juxtaposition between the body, our physical skin, and the dress as our social skin, moves into new territory in Drapery Abstractions.

The drapery bas-reliefs in cast glass and porcelain, premiering in this exhibition, represent an evolution of her work from figurative to abstract. In speaking to curator Tina Oldknow, LaMonte said explaining the progression in her work: ‘My two topographies of body and dress became joined in a third: the landscape. Where the human figure is an object of beauty, the landscape inspires the sublime.’

The fluid folds and subtle play of translucency and opacity in the glass panels and light and shadow in the ceramic, stand as metaphor not only for cloth but also skin, paint dissolving in water, smoke, landscape and architecture.

LaMonte, a New York City native, received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. In 1998, after several years of living and working as an artist in New York City, she won a Fulbright Fellowship, which enabled her to live and work in the Czech Republic, to pursue the casting of her large-scale sculptures.

In 2006, LaMonte was awarded a Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. A chance discovery of a parking lot full of drying fisherman’s nets during her stay in Japan, which revealed themselves to her as both drapery and landscape, inspired LaMonte to move her focus from dress to drapery – from body to landscape. Curator Tina Oldknow wrote of her work: “In LaMonte‘s view, perhaps, it is our yearning to perceive the magnificence of nature as well as the mystery and beauty of the body - and to find a meaningful connection between the two - that will be our ultimate consolation. In her work, the notions of beauty and the sublime speak to the same concern, which is charting the iconography of desire.”

Karen LaMonte is the recent recipient of the 2007 Jutta Cuny-Franz Memorial Award, the 2002 Urban Glass Award for New Talent in Glass and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation’s 2001 Biennial Award.

Her work is represented in museum collections such as the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, WI and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.

©  Heller Gallery 2010

Artist Information
Additional Available Works
About