Julie Karabenick | Evanston | Illinois | 1947-2020
Julie Karabenick (born in Evanston, Illinois, raised in Cleveland, Ohio) establishes a sustained and rigorous practice in geometric abstraction that spans more than four decades. After completing both a Bachelor of Arts and a PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she has lived since 1965, Karabenick brings to her art a perceptive awareness of perceptual systems, balance, and relational complexity. Her training in psychology informs her artistic inquiry, shaping a visual language that foregrounds tension, symmetry and asymmetry, and nuanced color interactions within an exacting geometric idiom.
Early in her artistic development, Karabenick gravitates toward abstraction as a field of research in which form and color operate as systems rather than representations of external subjects. Her paintings and prints articulate sequences, intervals, and spatial relationships through carefully modulated planes, grids, and intersecting elements. Rather than privileging expressive gesture, her work depends on the calibrated interplay of structure and sensation, inviting viewers to engage perceptually with the visual tensions she constructs.
For more than forty years Karabenick exhibits her work consistently in solo and group contexts across the United States. Solo exhibitions in Ann Arbor, Chicago, and New York City highlight the sustained evolution of her visual language over time, revealing both continuity and innovation within her use of geometric systems and color relations. In addition to her individual shows, she participates in more than sixty group exhibitions, aligning her practice with broader dialogues in contemporary abstraction and the ongoing reconfiguration of geometric aesthetics.
Karabenick’s paintings often focus on the orchestration of opposing forces—balance and tension, repetition and variation, symmetry and deviation—within a unified field. Her use of color is similarly calibrated, generating subtle shifts in hue and intensity that interact dynamically with underlying forms. In her prints, she explores seriality and permutation, using iterative processes to reveal the latent potential of simple geometric modules when subjected to systematic change.
Beyond her studio practice, Karabenick contributes to the discourse on abstraction as a curator and writer. She serves as editor of Geoform, an online scholarly art project dedicated to exploring the use of geometric form and structure in contemporary abstract art. Through Geoform, she fosters critical reflection on the conceptual and perceptual dimensions of geometric abstraction, situating her own work within a global context of artists who engage form as both method and meaning.
Karabenick’s career exemplifies an ongoing commitment to geometric exploration as a mode of perceptual inquiry. Her works do not simply deploy shapes and colors; they probe the conditions under which visual relationships emerge, shift, and sustain attention. By integrating analytical precision with aesthetic subtlety, her art expands the possibilities of geometric abstraction as a language capable of articulating balance not only as a visual principle, but as a dynamic, perceptual experience.