"Valor" Original Painting by Argentine artist Karina Gentinetta

Like many creatives, Karina Gentinetta’s road to success wasn’t a straight line. Before she became a prolific abstract painter of mesmerizing, charged works in acrylics, pencil, oil pastels and charcoal, she was a lawyer.

Born in Buenos Aires, Gentinetta and her siblings fled with her parents during Argentina’s Dirty War, when thousands of people were killed or forcibly disappeared by the government. The Gentinettas arrived in New Orleans, where Karina later graduated from Tulane University Law School. She initially wanted to major in art, but her cautionary parents — her father drove a taxi in New Orleans — urged their bright daughter to study something more practical.

She practiced law for 13 years before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, destroying her and her husband’s home. Gentinetta found herself at a fork in the road: law or art? She chose the latter. She also began to nurture her interest in the beauty of vintage objects and how they could be reborn, opening a shop for antique furniture. Some of her earliest paintings were made to complement her antique presentations.

Inspired by artists like Cy Twombly and Franz Kline, Gentinetta’s abstract paintings — typically pale canvases with calculated bursts of color — are emotional. Others bear a more stark palette of black and white with intense and sometimes graphic strokes. Gentinetta often uses materials that one might find at a construction site, like wall plaster and house paint, symbolically and tactilely responding to how her city was wrecked but has endured. Her collectors have included Courtney Love Cobain, and in 2016 she collaborated with RH Modern on a limited-edition series. Gentinetta’s work tells a unique story that does not end after a glance.

Find Karina Gentinetta’s art on 1stDibs.