Karen Turner

Suffolk-based portrait and figure painter Karen Turner trained at Hampstead Fine Arts College.

Her paintings mostly feature women and are a commentary on the weight of expectations placed on the female sex. With a particular focus on the physical body and the scrutiny to which it is commonly subjected, she works in oils and seeks to highlight pigments in the skin that can often go unnoticed, emphasising and exaggerating them to accentuate their extraordinariness.

She says, “Representations of defiance in the face of societal demands, the women in my paintings take pride in their physicality, at times hold masculine poses, and don’t shrink under the spotlight. They control their own image, presenting themselves as they wish to be seen, not as society expects.”

Often, her figures are closely cropped to represent the direct scrutiny a woman’s body is regularly placed under, judged not only on its ability to look pleasing, but also on its ability to live up to expectations around reproduction and motherhood.

“A common theme in my work is absence. In some cases, parts of a figure will bleed away to nothing, and in almost all paintings, she will be depicted devoid of surroundings. This serves as a reminder of the way in which we so often evaluate people without full context. The subjects in my paintings have no background, no clues to explain their story. We see what we see and nothing more.”

Karen’s work has been selected for the Portraits for NHS Heroes exhibition and the accompanying Bloomsbury book. In 2021, she was awarded the President’s Prize at the Institute of East Anglian Artists Open Exhibition and was a finalist in the Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painter Prize.