Calloway Fine Art & Consulting is pleased to announce Karen Silve’s solo show, The Sea & Shore - Finding Balance. The exhibition will be Karen Silve’s seventh solo exhibition at CFAC, with an opening reception May 5th from 5:00-7:00 pm.

Each of Silve’s exhibitions has been a unique investigation of the circumstances in her life at that moment. She has spent the past couple of summers abroad in her studio in Provence, visiting Italy this past summer, and we are thrilled to welcome her back to DC with The Sea & Shore.

The artworks in my latest exhibition, The Sea & Shore, Finding Balance, were inspired by the journey I took this past summer from my studio in Provence to Italy, traveling between Venice and the Cinque Terre, where I enjoyed experiencing two very different shorelines. From the grandeur of Venice to the Cinque Terre’s cliff-side peasant villages, the interplay of these colorful old-world landscapes with the majestic sea created a colorful dance.The shifting waters in the Venetian Lagoon offered inspiring reflections where the world seemed to be upside down. The water met the sky, the sky, the water. The city felt like it was constantly moving, shifting up and down. Similarly, kayaking off of the shoreline in Cinque Terre gave me a sense of imbalance, with the horizon moving up and down, and this imbalance resonated with me. I think we all needed to re-balance ourselves after COVID. Finding balance on shifting waters became the focus of these works.

My work stems from the observations of experiences that I reformulate into abstract expressions. The emotions I experience are my subject. The color and marks are my language, which I employ to express my personal experience. In many of these paintings I played with what is above and below a surface. The essence of these works embodies finding balance on a shifting foundation.

(Karen Silve)

Karen Silve was born in Springfield IL. Her mother, who is the daughter of an artist and a French chef, exposed Silve and her three siblings to art through visits to museums and classes. She was involved with art through high school and went on to receive a BFA from the University of Alabama, whose painting faculty, including the Italian artist Alvin Sella, had a strong abstract orientation. A formative experience, especially for her color sense, was the summer Silve spent painting the landscape in France at the Leo Marchutz School in Aix-in-Provence. Silve has acknowledged the role of personal experience in shaping her work. Crucial to these paintings is their physical immediacy and their connection with the natural world. Silve expresses this as being “within nature”, and includes the sights, smells and memories that an encounter in the world can generate.

Silve has exhibited her work extensively in solo exhibitions including at the Portland Performing Arts Center, the Forsyth Center Gallery at Texas A&M University, the Visual Art Center of Northwest Florida, the Tuscaloosa Performing Arts Center and the West Linn Public Library in Oregon. Group exhibitions include those at The Institute for American Universities, Aix-in-Provence, France, the Jemison-Carnegie Heritage Hall, Talledega AL, and the Art in Embassies Program, Doha, Qatar. Recently, her artwork has been acquired by two large art collections, one of which specializes in female mid-century abstract expressionist artists. This year, Silve has been chosen by the European Cultural Center to be one of the participating artists in their venues in Venice during the 2024 Venice Biennale.