Kara Maria

Kara Maria is a San Francisco–based visual artist known for her vibrant, multilayered paintings and mixed-media works that blend abstraction, vivid color, and representational imagery to explore political, environmental, and cultural issues, including biodiversity loss and climate change. She holds a BA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley and has exhibited widely across the United States, with work in major collections such as the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Crocker Art Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Maria’s art combines playful visual energy with serious commentary on contemporary concerns.

My paintings reflect my anxiety about the products and pollution of our synthetic culture as it is spread through the media, the military, and other sources of corporate sponsored global homogenization. Cheerfully apocalyptic, the work is intended to simultaneously attract and repel, blending beauty and toxicity, as in the supersaturated colors of a smoggy sunset.

- Kara Maria