Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 2

Karen Schiff
Karen Schiff, Word Snake G, 2014, Watercolor, Gouache, Rag Paper, Pencil

2014

$400
£300.69
€348.60
CA$558.46
A$625.51
CHF 325.47
MX$7,596.74
NOK 4,126.16
SEK 3,893.34
DKK 2,601.05
Shipping
Retrieving quote...
The 1stDibs Promise:
Authenticity Guarantee,
Money-Back Guarantee,
24-Hour Cancellation

About the Item

Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith based in New York; she has always been a reader as well as a visual artist. Her drawings, paintings, installations, and performances combine these pursuits by wondering about our conceptual frameworks for linguistic and physical experience. For “Scribing the Void,” Schiff is showing works on paper from 2014 through the present. In single lines of blank “writing,” her forms suggest a curious union between a snake and some leaning planks from a Serra sculpture. In other drawings these shapes form irregular grids, which Schiff associates with fields of language. (Texts used to be made from rectangular lead “sorts” of individual letters, compressed into metal frames for letterpress printing, but our experience of immersion in language is not so tight or regularly angled.) Schiff’s most recent drawings show these fields getting more irregular, and more spatially confounding. She likes to think about critic Jan Verwoert’s idea that the writer is immersed in language like a cow stands cooling in a pond; she also stays aware of a film on visualizing the fourth dimension which she first saw in 1985. In addition to this exhibition at ODETTA (in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn), Schiff’s work has been shown at galleries such as BravinLee Programs and Danese Gallery, both in New York City, and Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. Her artwork (and writing) was part of “Art = Text = Art” at museums including the Zimmerli Museum of Art at Rutgers University and the Hafnarborg Art Museum in Iceland. Schiff has also created online projects for the College Art Association’s Art Journal, such as “Counter to Type,” an invited artist’s project that included drawings that play with the journal’s page layouts, an essay, and an online video. Schiff is a Lecturer in Graduate Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. She holds an M.F.A. in Studio Art (School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Boston, 2006), and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory (University of Pennsylvania, 1998). Recently she has published in Art in America and Hyperallergic Weekend, as well as for the blog she co-edits with an artist she met at a Yaddo studio residency, Wallscrawler. Her writings tend toward issues of art and language, artist Agnes Martin, and complexities of identity. Her artworks are held in public, private, and corporate collections, such as the Kramarsky Collection (NYC), the Colby College Museum of Art (Maine), and the MCS Collection of Contemporary Drawing (Portugal).

More From This Seller

View All
Karen Schiff, Word Snake F, 2014, Watercolor, Gouache, Rag Paper, Pencil
By Karen Schiff
Located in Darien, CT
Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith based in New York; she has always been a reader as well as a visual artist. Her drawings, paintings, installations, and performances combine t...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Gouache, Rag Paper, Pencil

Karen Schiff, Word Snake, 2014, Watercolor, Rag Paper, Pencil
By Karen Schiff
Located in Darien, CT
Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith based in New York; she has always been a reader as well as a visual artist. Her drawings, paintings, installations, and performances combine t...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor, Rag Paper, Pencil

Karen Schiff, Word Snake H, 2014, Gouache, Graphite
By Karen Schiff
Located in Darien, CT
Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith based in New York; she has always been a reader as well as a visual artist. Her drawings, paintings, installations, and performances combine t...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and W...

Materials

Gouache, Graphite

Karen Schiff, Word Snake E, 2014, Watercolor, Graphite
By Karen Schiff
Located in Darien, CT
Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith based in New York; she has always been a reader as well as a visual artist. Her drawings, paintings, installations, and performances combine...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and W...

Materials

Watercolor, Graphite

Karen Schiff, Word Snake, 2014, Watercolor, Rag Paper, Graphite
By Karen Schiff
Located in Darien, CT
Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith based in New York; she has always been a reader as well as a visual artist. Her drawings, paintings, installations, and performances combine t...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and W...

Materials

Watercolor, Rag Paper, Graphite

Karen Schiff, Word Snake, 2014, Gouache, Rag Paper, Graphite
By Karen Schiff
Located in Darien, CT
Karen Schiff is an artist and wordsmith based in New York; she has always been a reader as well as a visual artist. Her drawings, paintings, installations, and performances combine t...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and W...

Materials

Gouache, Rag Paper, Graphite

You May Also Like

Fully Defined, 2023, colorful, abstract, watercolor on paper
Located in New York, NY
Sarah Brenneman is an American artist based in West Orange, New Jersey working primarily in painting. Her overarching interest lies in abstraction as a universal language and she wor...
Category

2010s Abstract Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Josette Urso "Sea Chain" Water Color on Paper
By Josette Urso
Located in New York, NY
Of her recent works, Urso states, "I make exploratory paintings, working in response to my immediate environment. My approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intu...
Category

2010s Abstract Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Watercolor

Unspoken Rule, A Vibrant Small Geometric Abstract Watercolor on Paper
Located in New York, NY
Sarah Brenneman’s Unspoken Rule (2024) is a delicate yet assertive watercolor on paper measuring 14 × 11 in. In this intimate abstraction, Brenneman begins with a central gesture—a v...
Category

2010s Contemporary Abstract Paintings

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Pencil

Markers #1 : contemporary abstract work of art
Located in New York, NY
Drawn from her imagination, Paula Elliott’s modern abstract works of art depict mysterious objects. In her works pastel has become the principal medium c...
Category

2010s Abstract Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Charcoal, Pastel, Acrylic, Pencil

This is What We Know, abstract, colorful, watercolor and acrylic on paper
Located in New York, NY
Sarah Brenneman is an American artist based in West Orange, New Jersey working primarily in painting. Her overarching interest lies in abstraction as a universal language and she wor...
Category

2010s Abstract Paintings

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Abstraction #13, Mixed Media Abstract Watercolor on Paper by Alexander Kwiat
By Alexander Kwiat
Located in Soquel, CA
"Abstraction #13", beautiful modernist abstract color field watercolor in pastel hues on paper by Alexander Kwiat (American, b. 1955). Signed lower right hand corner. Gallery label...
Category

1980s Color-Field Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor