Karen Lamassonne
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Raised in a multicultural and multilingual environment, Karen Lamassonne has lived and worked in the United States, Colombia, France, Germany and Italy. She started her artistic production in the early 1970s in Bogotá, when she became acquainted with the local arts scene. In the eighties, she moved to Cali where she became the only female member of The Cali Group, an informal collective of film directors, producers and aficionados that included Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina. This was a definitive period of her career in which she combined her experience in film making—mostly as an art director but also as an editor and occasional actress—with photography and video, all while her painting continued to thrive from and be nurtured by film, design, theater, and music. In her career as a painter, Lamassonne has represented her surroundings and emotions in which eroticism has been a clear protagonist. Self-portraits are a constant throughout her extensive watercolor production, along with bathrooms, tiles, unruly still lives, and intimate environments. Her creative drive springs from the necessity to communicate sensations and a very personal notion of self-discovery when confronting life's natural beauty along with its (passionate) experiences. Always looking for the surprising, or what is surreal in the familiar, Lamassone uncovers deeply emotional concerns in relation to memory, life, and death; revealing a sentimental itinerary of dreams and desires that, in retrospect, serve to emancipate her own sensuality and experience of being alive.
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Raised in a multicultural and multilingual environment, Karen Lamassonne has lived and worked in the United States, Colombia, France, Germany and Italy. She started her artistic production in the early 1970s in Bogotá, when she became acquainted with the local arts scene. In the eighties, she moved to Cali where she became the only female member of The Cali Group, an informal collective of film directors, producers and aficionados that included Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina. This was a definitive period of her career in which she combined her experience in film making—mostly as an art director but also as an editor and occasional actress—with photography and video, all while her painting continued to thrive from and be nurtured by film, design, theater, and music.
In her career as a painter, Lamassonne has represented her surroundings and emotions in which eroticism has been a clear protagonist. Self-portraits are a constant throughout her extensive watercolor production, along with bathrooms, tiles, unruly still lives, and intimate environments. Her creative drive springs from the necessity to communicate sensations and a very personal notion of self-discovery when confronting life’s natural beauty along with its (passionate) experiences. Always looking for the surprising, or what is surreal in the familiar, Lamassone uncovers deeply emotional concerns in relation to memory, life, and death; revealing a sentimental itinerary of dreams and desires that, in retrospect, serve to emancipate her own sensuality and experience of being alive.