Karam Arteen

Based is a Montreal-based painter whose practice is built on deliberate rupture—of form, narrative, and refinement. Working with crude, accelerated brushwork and flattened space, he rejects technical polish in favor of urgency and psychological weight. His paintings operate as mythic fragments rather than resolved images, often circling themes of inheritance, violence, and displacement. Figures such as riders, soldiers, and hybrid creatures recur not as symbols to decode but as carriers of compressed histories, where personal memory and collective myth collapse into one surface. Decay is not treated as subject matter but as a structural principle: surfaces feel eroded, incomplete, and unstable, as if the image itself is in the process of breaking down. Arteen’s work resists resolution, insisting instead on tension—between humor and brutality, past and present, control and collapse—positioning his paintings less as objects and more as remnants of an unfolding narrative.

bachelor of fine arts