Masked Print

Deborah Kern was born in 1969, Plainfield, NJ. She grew up in the Philadelphia area where she took early fine arts classes at Moore College of art and went on to receive her BFA in painting from Parsons School of Design in New York City in 1991. She spent the next two decades living and painting in New York , Mexico, Southeast Asia, and the Greek Islands to expand her vision and work. The resulting images take on a feminine quality in line and form. Gothic, romantic, expressionistic, and emotionally charged, her paintings often contain muted blacks and whites with pops of acidic, highly saturated color. She enjoys intricate almost sinister looking spidery lines against broad open sweeps of space. You see the influences from her travels in her work, most notably from Mexican artists such as Frida Kahlo and the more expressionistic work of David Siquieros. One also detects a love of the quirky flat faces and figures found in European medieval paintings as well as early Greek representations of the human form. The artist has exhibited and participated in many group shows such as The Astoria Artist Coalition Show in Athens Square Park, Astoria, as well as numerous exhibitions with the Organization of Independent Artists in the Wesbeth Gallery in New York City as well as the Montserrat Gallery in Soho. She has also designed and taught a portfolio preparation class for aspiring artists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and has recently put her sculptural talents to work in designing and constructing elaborate fondant cakes for private clients. Kern has most recently displayed at the Larry Elder Gallery in Charlotte, for the juried Carolina's got Art Exhibition, Artfields 2018 in Lake City, SC, Studio Channel Islands Collectors Choice Exhibit and Auction, as well as shows at the Hart-Weitzan Gallery, Advent Coworking, The Cultural Art Initiative, and Charlotte Art League where she won a merit award for one of 2 accepted works. She currently creates, teaches and resides in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband and 3 children.