Karen Russo (b.1974) is an Israeli-born artist living and working in London. In her exhibition at Circle1 gallery in Berlin she will show her video work "Externsteine" and a new series of charcoal drawings.
Karen Russo's works are about knowledge systems considered esoteric, erroneous and diametrically opposed to the enlightened tendencies Western culture prefers to adorn itself with. As such, she deals with occult rituals, collective mythical components, the dark side of wisdom taken from kabbalistic and Rosicrucian sources, thaumaturgy and paranormal phenomena - in short, all the knowledge rejected by modern science. That these abject themes are framed into the context of art by Russo gives them a renewed legitimacy, and this aesthetic perspective allows them to re-emerge on the surface, as a certain possibility of an unknown reality, being the upside reflection, as if in a curved mirror of what we perceived before to be the truths of life.