Hamid’s work regularly pulls from the combined traditions of pin-up modeling, vintage soft pornography and western art history to turn the concept of objectification on its head - his paintings focus on what the male gaze means, rather than being about an illict depiction of the female form.
Karim B Hamid (b. 1966 Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Denver, Colorado. He graduated in 1990 from Brighton University, United Kingdom where he obtained his MFA, follow by studying at the Royal Academy of Art London, United Kingdom and went on to obtain his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994. His work has been written about in Art Forum, the San Francisco Chronicle, and, NY Arts Magazine. His work is in the public collections of, ESMAO Museum Los Angeles, Coleccion Solo Museum Madrid, Pritzker Family Collection New York, as well as private collections worldwide.
“In my paintings there is an attempt to capture a kind of psychic element of the person or thing being observed. I am interested in focusing on the kind of details that are not readily available to the conditioned eye. I prefer to refer to my paintings as a sort of ‘psychic archaeology’ . I refer to a type of image that occurs in the blink of an eye. But through the magic of liquid paint it is a kind of quick moment that can be (and is) elongated and stretched further. In that stretched moment, there is a confusion in the mind’s eye about what it wants to see .... or what it can see. And, ultimately it becomes a question of what the mind does with what it sees. This type confusion is then carefully layered in a painting so that nothing is very clear upon first direct sight, but everything that was before battles to be seen.”
- Karim Hamid