Darina Karpov is a member of the first generation of contemporary artists to emerge from Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Born and raised in St. Petersburg. Karpov received her early academic training at the preperatory school for the Repin Academy of Art continuing at the Moscow Institute of Technology. After moving to the US she studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and MFA program at the Yale School of Art. She is represented by Pierogi Gallery in New York where she has had six solo shows. She also exhibited with Hales Gallery, London and was included in group shows at Neuberger Museum, DeCordova Museum, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Karpov’s work is represented in numerous public and private collections such as Princeton University Art Museum, West Collection, and Zabludowicz Trust, London. She is a recipient of 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, 2009 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, 2011 Leon Levy Foundation Grant, and 2008 National Academy’s William Paton Prize. She was awarded fellowships at Yaddo, McDowell Colony, UCross Foundation and two printmaking residencies at the Lower East Side Print Shop. Her work was featured in “Frozen Dreams: Contemporary Art from Russia,” by Hossein Amirsadeghi, Thames & Hudson.

Darina Karpov’s imagery, both abstract and figurative, is rooted in her childhood in Russia in the 80s during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The entanglement, confusion, anxiety of that period collides with a child’s sense of wonder and free association. Her process often involves the rendering of tangled thoughts, memories, and the mapping of synaptic connections in her mind. Karpov meticulously builds up her paintings, drawings and sculptures with multiple layers of textures and shapes executed in precise detail but set in an amorphous, multivalent space that manages to feel perfectly natural and totally illogical at the same time. In the words of the artist: “I think of the space as a kind of positive substance, active, vibrating, and malleable.” Her work is characterized by intricate technique and her treatment of subjects that seem to be caught in a a constant state of transformation.