Karen Azoulay (born 1977) [1] is a multidisciplinary visual artist and author from Toronto, Canada. [2] She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Azoulay’s artwork includes colorful sculpture, performance and installations. [3] Her interdisciplinary works, which explore language, natural elements, and the female form, are often captured in film or photography finished with collage or paint. [4] She uses ephemeral materials such as fresh flowers, clay, and her own body. [4] In her exhibition Semi-Precious (2019) at Essex Flowers, Azoulay drew inspiration from a skeleton of an 11th-century German woman, who was found to have remnants of lapis lazuli on her teeth, indicating she was likely a manuscript illuminator. [5] Azoulay's "Eating Flowers" motif, in which she consumes different flowers with dark, glitter-coated lips and teeth, explores ideas of vulnerability, nourishment, and decay. [6]
Solo exhibitions include CUE Art Foundation in New York, curated by Glenn Ligon, [7] Fire Tale, Four Gallery in Dublin, [8] Deep, Deep Under the Sea, Mercer Union in Toronto, [9] Sculpture After the Apocalypse, Primetime, Brooklyn, [10] The Botanist’s Mime, Dose Projects, Brooklyn, [11] and Indexing the Leaves, Methodist Archives, Drew University in Madison, NJ. [12]
In March 2023, Azoulay published a book on the Victorian language of flowers, titled Flowers and Their Meanings, The Secret Language and History of Over 600 Blooms. [13]
Published by Clarkson Potter (an imprint of Penguin Random House), the 248-page book includes a foreword by bestselling author Kate Bolick, a dictionary of over 600 flowers, an index organized by theme, and essays about the history of floriography. It is illustrated with a combination of nineteenth-century botanical illustrations and Azoulay’s own photography. [13]
The book expands upon the topic of a booklet Azoulay self-published in 2015, titled Flowers and their Meanings, which also includes her photography and a dictionary of Victorian flower symbolism. [14] [15]
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