A native of France, Karine Laval has successfully carved out a career in the New York photography world. She produces a highly distinctive and idiosyncratic style of image both for newspaper and magazine assignments as well as for her own personal work. She has exhibited twice in solo shows at Crane Kalman and has recently featured her fourth solo project at New York’s leading contemporary photography specialist, the Benrubi Gallery.
One of Laval’s on-gong projects, Poolscapes, continues themes from her earlier work, most notably her continuing obsession with water, but rendered in a more ethereal, abstract way. Laval continues to explore the vagaries of perception and tests the limits of the photographic medium by using water as a distorting lens and choosing a stark colour palette – the result of her signature film processing – to generate images which alternate between representation and abstraction, and blur the boundary
between photography and painting.
United States and internationally at such venues as the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the Sorlandet Art Museum in Kristiansand (Norway), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and at several photo festivals throughout Europe and the US. Laval was a finalist of France’s Villa Medicis Hors Les Murs and she is the recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant. A book looking back on 10 years of her work is to be published later this year by Steidl.
To see more of Karine’s work, go to the Photographers section.
