Bio

Karen Mainenti is a New York-based artist whose work explores themes of femininity, consumer culture, and material history through painting, sculpture, and installation. She has presented solo exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Bard Graduate Center Library, Ground Floor Gallery, and Chashama, and has recently shown in group exhibitions at the Every Woman Biennial, the National Arts Club, Louise Nevelson Chapel, and Established Gallery. Her work has been featured in prominent publications including ARTnews, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, and The Believer Magazine. In addition to her studio practice, Mainenti collaborates with artist Sasha Chavchavadze on Footnote Project Space and serves on the board of Arts Gowanus, where she has also held the role of chair. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Bard Graduate Center Library in 2018.

Artist Statement

I explore the visual language of consumer culture—its products, packaging, promises, and taglines—to examine how ideals around femininity, beauty, and perfection are constructed, sold, and recycled over time. My work plays with the contradictions embedded in these messages: the allure and the absurdity, the nostalgia and the critique.

Using a range of materials and methods—drawing, painting, casting, collage—I reimagine everyday objects and ephemera to highlight what they reveal about cultural values, both past and present. Whether hand-painting a label onto a bottle salvaged from a mid-century landfill or gilding an over-the-top beauty ad with gold leaf, I’m interested in how meaning accumulates in the things we discard—or cling to.

There’s humor in the process, but it’s a kind of deadpan humor: a lipstick name that sounds like a punchline, an apology that reads like a label, a porcelain bottle that mimics a body. I’m drawn to the tension between surface and substance, between what we’re sold and what we actually buy into. By reframing these artifacts of desire and disposal, I invite viewers to look closer—not just at the object, but at the systems behind it.