Keren Kroul

Lives and works in Miami, FL, USA

Artist statement

I was raised in a family enveloped in the shadows of people and places. My father fled Argentina during the political purge of the Dirty War, three generations after his ancestors found refuge there from the pogroms of the Pale of Settlement. My mother is the daughter of Holocaust survivors of Austrian and Romanian descent, her extended family victims of genocide. Attracted to and horrified by the yearning that this inheritance elicits, I explore the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H history that continues to shape my identity. In watercolor on paper paintings, suspended cut paper installations, and video projections, I reflect on a heritage of loss and longing, finding love and hope and a tenacious resilience. I weave memory and terrain into fantastical landscapes, collapsing past and present into porous and fluid topographies of recreated reality. I mine family stories, photographs and maps for small units of shape and color that are fragmented, abstracted, and repeated. The watercolor works are painted with tiny brushes, marks accumulated into dense and rhythmic passages. The paper installations are cut out with an exacto knife, images drawn with empty space, materializing the weight of absence. Slow, meticulous, the process is deliberately labored and prolonged, embedding time into the work. As long as I am working, these stories remain alive, and so is my connection to them. Working on paper, I think of documenting and storytelling,...

Artwork