Artist

Karla Kaplun was born in 1993 in Querétaro, Mexico. She currently lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. Kaplun confronts colonial histories of her native Mexico through a multidisciplinary exploration of Baroque aesthetics. Working across mediums of painting, drawing, collage, video and participatory workshops, she thematises the influence of Spanish conquest on formations of Mexican cultural identity through a distinctive visual language characterised by dynamic contrasts, fluid compositions and evocative imagery. Kaplun’s visual vocabulary adapts an array of references, both sacred and profane, to configure enigmatic and unresolved narratives. Perceptual paradoxes abound in her paintings, reflecting the syncretic formations of Mexican identity wrought by three centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Throughout her work, Kaplun appropriates aspects of Caravaggio’s cinematic drama, Ribera’s morbid tropes and El Greco’s ethereal sensuousness, yet she deploys these elements to assert an implicit critique of power structures perpetuated by the European painting tradition and the painful legacy of subjugation imposed upon indigenous peoples by Western colonisers. Kaplun’s contemporary interpretation of Mexican Baroque borrows motifs and subjects from the Biblical canon and strips them of religious function, inverting Catholic mechanisms of sociocultural supremacy and reclaiming agency over representations of historical trauma. Recent solo exhibitions include High Art, Paris; Gaga & Reena Spaulings, Los Angeles; House of Gaga, Mexico City. Recent group shows include: Lodos Gallery, Mexico City; Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo; Britta Rettberg, Munich.