Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: karlawozniak.com
Karla Wozniak is a Bay Area-based painter who grew up in California and earned her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2000) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2005). During her studies she also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2003) and participated in RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome. After years working in New York, she returned to the Bay Area around 2015 and has since been based in Berkeley, where she serves as Associate Professor of Painting, Drawing, and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Wozniak has received wide recognition for her work, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2011), two MacDowell Colony residencies (2006, 2008), and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program grant. In 2019 she was named a finalist for SFMOMA’s SECA Award. Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Knoxville Museum of Art. Her work has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle, and the Village Voice.
She is represented by Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco, GGLA in Los Angeles, and Et al. in San Francisco.
Wozniak works primarily in oil on canvas, often incorporating acrylic in underlayers, building up heavily textured impasto surfaces in vivid, effervescent color. A defining feature of her compositions is the use of looping, linear marks that divide the picture plane into distinct “pockets of experience” — zones that vary in density, texture, and psychological mood. These lines hover between the legible and the abstract: at times they evoke smoke, jump ropes, water, or plant forms; elsewhere they function as pure formal structures recalling early modernism. Wozniak has cited Charles Burchfield, Henri Matisse, and Hilma af Klint as touchstones.
Her work draws on two intertwined sources: the uninhibited play of childhood — particularly the games and imaginative worlds of her daughter — and the dramatic, increasingly anxiety-laden weather of the Bay Area, from wind and fire to floods and smoke. This tension between levity and unease gives the paintings their characteristic psychological charge. Wozniak begins each series with a nightly graphite drawing practice, a process she developed during the early years of the pandemic as a form of intuitive exploration before moving to paint.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.