Karen Hackenberg
Karen Hackenberg received her BFA in painting from RISD, moved west to live for a decade and a half in San Francisco, and now lives and works near Seattle, WA.
In her ongoing painting and drawing series, she takes a light-hearted yet subversive approach to the serious issue of ocean degradation, presenting a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of imaginary post-consumer sea creatures. Working traditionally with oil and gouache, she lovingly and meticulously crafts images of beach trash, aiming to create a provocative collision of form and idea. Pop Art of the 1960s has influenced her work - Claes Oldenburg's monumental everyday objects and Ed Ruscha's paintings combining marketing graphics with images of nature.
Her paintings are inspired by the incongruity of the human-made detritus that washes up on the otherwise pristine beach below her studio - plastic shards, plastic bottles, plastic toy animals, shotgun shells, and product packages, to name a few.
Hackenberg's work was featured in The Courtauldian Magazine, London UK, LoDown Magazine, Berlin, Germany, BlackBook Magazine, Brooklyn, NY, and on a Brooklyn, NY billboard for the I Am Water project on the topic of clean water, one of six artists selected from one hundred and fifty.
Hackenberg's was recently awarded a Northwest Perspectives solo exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum coming up in 2024.
Her museum exhibitions include Surge at Museum of Northwest Art; Northwest Art Now at the Tacoma Art Museum; Karen Hackenberg; Watershed, a solo exhibition at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art; the U.S. traveling Environmental Impact show; Neo-Naturalists at Museum of Northwest Art; Stilleven: Contemporary Still Life at Hallie Ford Museum of Art; and Beneath the Surface: Rediscovering a World Worth Conserving at American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington DC.
Her green sensibility has earned a place in numerous private and public collections, including the Paul Allen Collection, WA; the New York State Museum, NY; the Portland Art Museum, OR; the Tacoma Art Museum, WA; King County Portable Works, WA, the Washington State Art Collection, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, WA, and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, OR.
