Karen Sperling with her painting, Magical Mystical Tour #15, on display at Lurie Gallery in Miami during Art Basel 2008.
Art Beyond Reality and Imagination
Karen Sperling's work takes the viewer on a high octane roller coaster ride beyond reality and imagination.
All aboard!
Bob HoggeGallery Director
Monkdogz Urban Art Gallery
Chelsea, New York City
Art Stands Out
Love your work--it stands out in a crowd.
Roger LoydGallery Director
Gallery Loyd
Oslo, Norway
Karen Sperling's Art Web Sites
Click here to see Karen Sperling's abstracts at the Saatchi web site.
Click here to visit Karen Sperling's art web site.
Click here to see photos from the opening night reception at Monkdogz gallery in New York's Chelsea section.
Click here to see more photos from opening night at Monkdogz.
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Magical Mystical Tour
Since my childhood in New York, I've had a recurring dream in which the expansive highways leading to gigantic bridges turn into roller coasters as I travel over them.
The Magical Mystical Tour series stems from this idea of highways turning into roller coasters.
The series also stems from my enjoyment as a child of books like Alice in Wonderland, where characters can go through mundane household objects like mirrors and find other worlds.
When my friend artist Laurence Gartel looked at my paintings in this series, he said they looked mystical to him because he had just returned from the funeral of his friend, artist Nam June Paik.
I said yes, that's exactly what these paintings are, Magical Mystical Tours, a takeoff on the Beatles song title.
I was also interested to learn that Georgia O'Keeffe, whose birthday and mine are 2 days--and several decades--apart also saw her art as mystical, like the art of Kandinsky, whose book about mystical art she read throughout her lifetime. I didn't know it when I started this series that stems from my traditional charcoal abstracts, but Georgia O'Keeffe also drew charcoal abstracts.
Even finding all of these connections is an example of a Magical Mystical Tour, and what I am trying to conjure up in these paintings.
The first image, Stairway, is the beginning of the tour, and the rest of the paintings are the journey along the way.
You see some recognizable elements like roller coasters and highways, sort of like signposts in a strange world where you also see things that I may or may not have put there, based on your own ideas and perceptions.
While as the artist I'm the tour guide, presenting these little journeys, the viewer really determines the ride's meaning to him or her--the tours will mean different things to different people, like Rorschach ink blots.
As the tour guide, my hope is that viewers will get that feeling I get when I stand in front of a painting in a museum that "sends me," like the work of the Abstract Expressionists, Futurists and Surrealists--that feeling that you're going both inside the painting and inside yourself.
Though the first dictionary definition of mystic relates to religious experience, it's the last several entries I intend for my Magical Mystical Tour series: inspiring a sense of mystery and wonder; mysterious, strange; enigmatic, obscure.
Two of the visitors to Karen Sperling's New York debut at Monkdogz gallery discuss the true meaning of Magical Mystical Tours.