biography Caimi (b.1985) is a contemporary painter living and working in New Mexico. Her large-scale figurative work explores the unabashed expression of personal identity and personal truths that challenge our time-worn social constructs. Her work highlights the strength and ferocity of female beauty, through a careful and methodical deglamorization of her subjects. Ever-present throughout her work, are the fluorescent hues and shapes which speak to the advertorial, graphic nature of her narratives and represent the pressures faced by modern women. Through their intense chroma and monumental scale, Caimi's work celebrates the power of visual communication as a means to express higher truths and evoke empathy in her viewers. Caimi completed a BFA (Summa Cum Laude) in Painting from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA in 2010. Her work has shown internationally and has been featured in many publications. In 2018, the painter became a nominee for The Bennett Prize, a $50,000 grant awarded to female figurative painters. artist statement
My work uses humor to speak to deeper contemporary questions, primarily to the issues that young women face in culture today. I have learned how to paint my figures as the Old Masters painted theirs, with serious precision. However, I always add a form of uninhibited contemporary conceptualism (often colorful, satirical, symbolic, and sometimes dark) into each of my paintings. This creates a married tension between the two art forms in a way that imbues my concepts. Whether I am literally stabbing a painting to illustrate the process of anger, grief, and forgiveness, or painting a classical nude wrestling with her hair (which seems to love her unconditionally), or referencing cartoons to clearly show what consent means, I am always looking for ways to both comfort and scare myself a little bit in order to elucidate the female condition. I’m searching for humor in the darkness by pushing each painting into a more complex understanding of what it means to be human, and perhaps get a little chuckle out of it all.
CURRNET ARTICLES
The Magazine: Interview with Dorielle Caimi