5 October 2026 – 6 January 2027
1640 Electra Boulevard, Sidney, BC
Daily, 3:30am – 1:30am
The venue at YYJ is the café area before security
About the Artist:
Karen Muntean has a BA in art and worked for twenty years as a graphic artist. Having always enjoyed watercolour painting she began to develop a body of work in large format watercolour on themes such as windows, bones, masks, and flowers. As the graphic art work tailed off she switched from watercolour painting to monotypes and encaustic paintings. For a while she and a partner on Saturna had a small business doing fabric painting and printing. In the last twenty years she has focused on large acrylic paintings and small linoprints. The acrylics shown here are from the last sixteen years.
Karen was born in Idaho and immigrated to Canada in the 1970s, residing in the Kootenays, Vancouver, Saturna Island and Victoria. She operated Gallery Rosa, a showcase for Gulf Island artists, for ten years from 1998-2008. Karen has participated in many juried group shows and had nine solo shows in public and private galleries.
Contact info: munteankaren1@gmail.com
Artist Statement:
All this pattern based work is a vehicle for colour, a language of its own. The geometries are universal and allow the eye and mind a specific place to roam while the colour speaks out. Daphne Shohamy, a researcher from Columbia University, says that “….art has an effect on our general cognitive state, that goes beyond how much we enjoy it, to change the way we perceive events and make decisions.” She says that abstract art shifts us away from concrete details towards abstract ideas and allows us to explore within ourselves.