Banner artwork: Michael Kareken, Scrap Bottles, oil on canvas, 108” x 168”, 2009. You can see this piece and others in this recent series of work in Kareken's current MAEP exhibition, Scrap, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through January 24.
Cropped and reproduced for access+ENGAGE with permission of the artist
About his work, Kareken writes: "My recent body of work, begun in late 2006, has grown out of my interest in a paper recycling plant located next to my studio building. After making a series of paintings of the paper plant, I researched other recycling and waste facilities in the area, including scrap metal yards, a bottle factory, and a neighborhood recycling facility. 
"I became fascinated by the piles of scrap material at these sites, which uncannily resemble the natural landscape in their structure and complexity, textural and topographical variety, transformations due to light and weather, and cyclical rhythms and patterns. In the initial series of paintings I made of these subjects I attempted to evoke this connection to the natural landscape by focusing on the particularities of light and atmosphere, and by employing a painterly technique informed by 19th century romantic and realist landscape traditions.
"More recently my focus has shifted from broader views of the sites to the scrap material itself. Sorted and organized by type, it tends to resist categorization and orderliness – the wind blows the paper out of its neatly defined piles and stacks, scattering it across the yard; crushed into cubes, the rusted metal bends and twirls, creating organic rhythms at odds with the rigid geometry imposed upon it. The imagery is rich with associations -- life and death, growth and decay, order and entropy, structure and chaos.
About the artist: Michael Kareken received a BA in Visual art from Bowdoin College in 1983, and his MFA degree from Brooklyn College, CUNY in 1986. After graduating from Brooklyn College, Kareken lived and worked in New York City until 1993, when he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since 1996, he has taught at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, where he is a Professor of Fine Arts. Kareken is the recipient of a 2009-2010 McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship. He has also received grants from the Bush Foundation (2000), the Minnesota State Arts Board (2007, 2000, 1996), Arts Midwest (1994), the New York Foundation for the Arts (1990), and the Vogelstein Foundation (1993), as well as a residency fellowship from the Millay Colony for the Arts (1988). Kareken has exhibited his work in numerous group and solo exhibitions regionally and nationally, including shows in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Santa Fe. His work is held in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Frederick Weisman Museum of Art, and the Minnesota Historical Society, among others.
Additional information about the artist is available online: a radio piece on Kareken's work by KUMD and a video interview by the art blog Painting Perceptions. You can see more examples of the artist's work on his website or mnartists.org/michael_kareken. Inquiries about specific pieces may be directed to Groveland Gallery.
Upcoming exhibitions:
You can see Michael Kareken's new exhibition, Scrap, in the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) galleries of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through January 24.
His work will be included in the Weisman's forthcoming group exhibition, Common Sense: Art and the Quotidian, which opens February 6. Kareken will have a solo show at Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis -- Paper, Glass, Metal -- opening March 5. The artist's work will also be exhibited in two shows this summer: the 2009/10 MCAD/McKnight Artist Fellowship Exhibition and Impact at the Bloomington Art Center.
Image credits: (Middle right) Magnet, oil on canvas, 96” x 78”, 2009. (Bottom) Compressed Oil Drums (detail), oil on canvas, 68” x 84”, 2009. Photos courtesy of the artist.