Caro Dranow

Caro Dranow (b. 1998) is an emerging artist based in Bridgehampton, NY. While her creative practice spans diverse media, including painting, collage, printmaking, and sculpture, her work is primarily grounded in a rigorous love of oil painting that explores the relationship between nature and culture. Simultaneously colorful and cinematic, Caro employs classical oil painting techniques, layered along with expressive oil stick drawings to create her dreamscapes and figures. Speaking to a softness and resilience that she observes in nature and women, Caro challenges the historically male conventions of representation with a distinctly urgent and feminist perspective. At 28, she has been featured in premier galleries such as the Ethan Cohen Gallery and New Apostle Gallery in New York and was included in the 2022 Every Woman’s London Biennial at the Copeland Gallery in London.

"While my creative practice is currently grounded in painting, I consider my work inherently interdisciplinary. With a distinctly humorous and feminist lens, I explore the relationship between nature and culture through paint, In order to reimagine female archetypes. Ranging from large-scale landscapes to portraits and genre scenes, I explore themes of eroticism, exploitation, and pleasure in order to discover the possibilities that come from confronting societal myths as they relate to gender.

For the past three years, my focus was centered on landscape painting, when in May of 2023, a devastating fire destroyed all of my work as well as my studio. The gutting experience prompted a distinct shift in my subject matter as I turned inward for inspiration and began a new figurative series.

A self-proclaimed scholar of pop culture, I now approach the canvas as a site of assemblage. Drawing from a well of public and personal references when composing work, I am deeply influenced by experiencing girlhood in the early 2000s. I return to the glimmering hypersexualized depictions of women I absorbed as a child, and paint to transform these flattened presentations of women into exalted and complex characters. Often using feminine tropes as a point of departure, I look to pornography, pulp fiction, tabloids, and film for further reference. I renegotiate and rework these lowbrow images to become sources for the figures I then render on canvas.

Often starting with a collage or faint image transfer, my paintings are heavily layered, leveraging the unique properties of oil paint to create illusionistic volume and tension with the source material buried beneath. The slow process of digesting and deconstructing the media that I consume has become as essential to my work as the act of painting itself. Making art in an era dominated by mass media and the digital consumption of images, ultimately, my hope is that my work offers a moment of uncanny pause with the women I immortalize in paint.

With a recent focus on depicting women in swimming pools and beach fronts, I explore the cultural relevance of these sites as symbols of not only wealth and status, but also narcissism and escape. Inspired by the surfeit and spectacle living on the East End of Long Island, I enjoy playing with the imagination of an overstimulated and desensitized audience. Commanding psychological space and drenched in color, I present visions of women and their bodies autonomously lounging, crying, swimming, eating, and moaning- satirizing a rarefied world governed by pleasure, with its own reflection."