Kara Maria

[3][4][5] Her work outwardly conveys a sense of playfulness and humor that gives way to explicit or subtle examinations—sometimes described as "cheerfully apocalyptic"[6]—of issues including ecological collapse, diminishing biodiversity, military violence and the sexual exploitation of women.

[12][27][11] Her work arose in the aftermath of the 1980s and 1990s postmodern ethos of mixing styles—in her case, those of artists Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Philip Guston, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke have been cited.

[12][4][10] For example, the pink, orange and purple Boom juxtaposed the title exclamation, bursts and smoke trails with stars inscribed with white line drawings of women's hands and genitals and a phallic lavender missile;[12] Un Jeu was a multilayered work incorporating a television interruption pattern, looping arabesques, silhouettes of rabbits and pistols, and black dots suggesting either droppings or ammunition pellets.

[31][32] In subsequent work, presented in the solo exhibitions "Paradise Lost" (2007) and "Dystopia" (2008), she shifted to detailed, realistic renderings of emotionally charged figures and objects that often dominated backdrops featuring assorted abstract and Pop art gestures.

[10][29] These paintings uncomfortably merged war iconography (soldiers, fighter jets, camouflage patterns and references to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal), the palpable flesh of pornography, and consumer culture imagery (e.g., Gas Pump, 2007) to visceral effect.

[10] In a review of the "Dystopia" show, the San Francisco Chronicle's Reyhan Harmanci wrote, "The energy in her paintings is intense: Maria has pushed the meeting of naked women and instruments of war past comfort, and the images can shock.

She embedded carefully rendered portraits of animals that inhabited or passed through the site (e.g., seagulls, raccoons, hawks) into brightly colored compositions of disjointed, swirling abstract forms that conveyed the constantly churning, tumultuous quality of the facility.

[9][30] She extended these works to include a wider range of animals (e.g., primates, rhinos, bats and leopards) and painterly gesture (starburst explosions, spiraling vapor trails, hard-edged quasi-cubist spaces, paint smears and Lichtenstein-like dots and stripes) in the exhibition "Haywire" (2015), which was likened in a review to a pop surrealist requiem over "dystopian resignation.

[5][1] Writers have noted in these works a clear visual metaphor of restrained versus feral: disarmingly unperturbed animals rendered with great control that serve as calm, still points dominated by and dwarfed within decidedly unnatural, heterogeneous abstract tangles.