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 H, 2014, Gouache, Graphite

2014

$400
£298.78
€346.39
CA$555.39
A$622.52
CHF 324.13
MX$7,601.24
NOK 4,115.25
SEK 3,900.89
DKK 2,584.44
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 G, 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, 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

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 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, 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, 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

You May Also Like

Britt (geometric, neutrals, acrylic on paper painting)
By Carole Eisner
Located in New York, NY
Acrylic on Arches paper
Category

1970s Abstract Geometric Abstract Paintings

Materials

Acrylic, Paper

Untitled 12 - Abstract Gouache on Paper
By Dmitry Samygin
Located in Paris, FR
"Untitled 12" is a gouache on paper by contemporary Russian artist Dmitry Samygin. Minimalist and geometric drawings.
Category

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

Materials

Gouache

Here and There #4
By Kate Shepherd
Located in Houston, TX
Kate Shepherd Here and There #4, 2020 Enamel and transfer on paper 12 1/2 x 19 inches
Category

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

Materials

Enamel

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

Untitled, Small Works No. 51, green geometric abstraction, work on paper
By Sasha Hallock
Located in New York, NY
Between September 2018 and April 2019, I created 100 small paintings consecutively. I endeavored to make nothing else and viewed the project as an opportunity to experiment and solid...
Category

2010s Abstract Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Wood Panel, Color Pencil, Graphite

Shape of Resonance 18
By Danielle Hacche
Located in Phoenix, AZ
pastel and micron pen on paper, framed b. 1979, Poole, Dorset, UK In this new series of work, I explore the intersection of minimalist architecture, design, and the raw beauty of ma...
Category

2010s Abstract Geometric Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Paper, Pen