Pleasures and Days 

Karla Wozniak

Exhibition Dates: December 14th, 2024 - February 1st, 2025

GGLA is pleased to present Pleasures and Days, a solo exhibition by Bay Area-based painter Karla Wozniak. Referencing Proust’s first published book Les Plaisirs et les Jours, Wozniak’s recent paintings vibrate with a playful and effervescent energy as they oscillate between abstraction and representation. Having spent years painting inventive landscapes that stretched the historical genre, more recently Wozniak has shifted to exploring abstraction as a means of touching on such broad themes as time and seasonality, synesthesia and phenomenological reactions to color, and of course landscape, amongst other things.

Within Pinwheel and Vines, the artist’s largest canvas of the exhibition, we see a litany of techniques and modes of paint application coalesce and radiate from a thickly impastoed bullseye at the approximate center of the canvas. Spreading out from this central point, are fields of layered dry brushed color, broken up by stippled contrasts, or bisected by a thickly caked line of periwinkle oil paint that waxes and wanes in depth. Wozniak distills so many senses of time, place, and color within one composition, that a certain sector calls forth a purple-y pink sunset, while another resembles a receding and sun dappled body of water. A range of abstracted plant forms climb the left of the canvas amid a warmth of summer-y earth tones, oranges and greens. It’s this quality that sets Wozniak’s work apart–the ability to bring harmony and lightheartedness to a canvas that is also chock full of so much information and feeling, rendering a painting that rewards the viewer time and time again.

Play, immediacy and improvisation are integral to Wozniak’s approach to painting. Within the mid-sized Sun and Wheat, the artist flips the associations of landscape on its head as the canvas is divided into thin vertical striations, yet there still remain allusions to space and place, the warmth and cool of seasons, and the ways in which light falls from day to day simply through the application of color. Thick and thin lines traverse the canvas, creating what Wozniak terms, “pockets of experience”–smaller bits of the painting that become full universes in and of themselves, and have a kind of synesthetic quality. Yet throughout the artist’s work, it’s the line that is always present, evoking different things in different paintings, from smoke, wire and string, to plants, cursive and the distant echoes of modernist forms. And much like the lines that tie Wozniak’s compositions together, which commune with the origins and pioneers of abstraction, just as the fields of color speak to landscapes, nature, heat and sound in a variety of ways–Wozniak paints with a liberty and freeness that is unbeholden to the rigidity of traditionalism or dusty genres, instead allowing the paintings to develop and build in a logic and method that is entirely the artist’s own.