One Thing After Another: Karen Carson Retrospective

August 25, 2026 – December 12, 2026

One Thing After Another highlights the remarkable creative output of Los Angeles-based artist Karen Carson’s five decades of experimentation, balancing the rigor of her intellectual and technical pursuits with a wonderfully infectious playfulness.

Karen Carson has pursued an artistic career defined by curiosity, experimentation, and a remarkable command of color and composition. She began her career at a time when Abstraction and Minimalism dominated the art world—and women artists often struggled for recognition. From her early zipper paintings, which transformed the flat surface of painting into something tactile and interactive, to her graphic banners, sculptural abstract paintings, lightboxes, and narrative works, Carson has continually drawn inspiration from a wide range of sources while maintaining a consistent interest in material exploration, popular culture, and the experiential possibilities of color.

While her work traverses and evolves in response to her lived experiences, her commitment to the intellectual pursuit of painting, along with keeping the work playful, sometimes even irreverent, is refreshing. Her works are often humorous and inviting, with subject matter we can all relate to, yet they reveal a sophisticated understanding of composition, structure, and color relationships. Whether creating abstract constructions, advertising sign-inspired graphics, landscape paintings, or farm machinery, each body of work has an element of surprise, edging into the radical yet always approachable.

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