In her drawings, Karen Russo’s explorations of the darker side of human experience open onto scenes of occult happenings, uncontrollable impulses and mysterious, enigmatic landscapes and exploit the way drawing can summon up hybrid worlds. Untitled (2015) is one such landscape from Russo’s ongoing series of large-scale drawings in charcoal. In the stark expressionist contrast of shadows and light, we are presented with a scene of almost inhuman strangeness; five rhomboid monoliths – based on the standing stones built by super-intelligent ants in Saul Bass’ cult movie Phase IV (1974) – curve across the foreground, flashing with a blinding, mysterious light. Behind them rises a huge ornate winged form, rises against sick, tormented skies night skies. Its design is borrowed from a 1922 monument by Bernhard Hoetger, the Niedersachsenstein in Worpswede, Germany, which honours soldiers who fell in WWI. Placed beside the monoliths, however, it resembles a high priest presiding over a ritual, or a spaceship preparing to launch, or a demon summoned up from the depths of hell. In two other drawings, Morlock Temple with Barlach Head (2015), and Morlock Temple on Fire (2019), Russo takes as her departure point a set from George Pal’s 1960 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine. While Pal topped his troglodytes’ sacred site with a statue of a sphinx, the artist swaps out this mythological creature for another Expressionist commemoration of Germany’s military dead, Ernst Barlach’s bronze sculpture The Floating Angel (1927). These fusions collapse the distance between different places and eras between the real world, and the realm of fiction.
“The underground world depicted in my work suggests a metaphor for an inner world, where forces, powers and energies interact, as well as a metaphor for a darkened political landscape – a world without light where social healing has to take place.”

Born in Israel in 1974, Karen Russo studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and has had solo exhibitions at One in the Other, London (2006); Dvir Gallery, Tel-Aviv (2006); Delfina, London (2005); VTO, London (2005); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2001); Herzliya Museum, Israel (2000). Recent group exhibitions include ‘An Archaeology’, Project 176, London (2007); Montevideo, Amsterdam (2007); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2007); Krefeld Museum, Germany (2006). Russo lives and works in London.