The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. was established in 1985 for the sole purpose of providing financial assistance to individual visual artists of established ability through the generosity of the late Lee Krasner, one of the leading abstract expressionist painters and the widow of Jackson Pollock.
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s dual criteria for grants are recognizable artistic merit and demonstrable financial need, whether professional, personal or both. The Foundation’s mission is to aid, internationally, those individuals who have worked as professional artists over a significant period of time.
Karen Lofgren’s work incorporates pop-cultural, punk, and minimal aesthetics—with reverence for ritual, material, and process. She is recognized for darkly delving into the collective unconscious through sculpture and installation, as well as video, photography, sound, and works on paper. The work taps into cultural anxiety, contemporary ritual, and ancient mythology through objects and environments at life scale. Referencing recent practices such as feminism and self-actualization as well as mythology, and ancient cultures—historical and philosophical content is transformed to create objects and environments that may reflect and then dissolve the familiar—reaching into the void. Her work is described by critics as tapping into our collective unconscious and bringing up questions of secrecy and power by way of PT Barnum showmanship. Investigating the relationship between alchemy, divination, minimalism, and contemporary sculptural practices, her work uses a dose of the fantastic with potent uncertainty, and a subtle sleight of institutional critique to reveal deep and troubling complexities below the surface.
