Helen Karanika

"Born and raised in Greece, I relocated to Montreal in 1987, where I still live and work. My training in art comes from formal classes and intensive personal study but, most of all, continuous experimentation. I like to use different media and to investigate the materiality and expressive quality of each. Drawing is an integral part of my work, and quite often I draw inspiration from failed works on paper that I like to tear up and reassemble into collage pieces. I am particularly interested in the juncture of figuration and abstraction, and in making layered paintings that reveal the various stages of their creation. I am constantly working to develop my personal visual language, exploring relationships between shapes, lines and colours."