ZAne Karklina

ARTIST 

I am drawn to vivid, high-chroma colour and to the atmosphere created when intense pinks, oranges, reds, and fluorescent tones meet, collide, or sit beside one another. I want colour to have its own physical and emotional force — to create light, energy and visual vibration within the painting. 

Zanima is the contemporary painter's identity of London-based artist Zane Karklina whose work combines expressive figuration and abstraction. 

The human body is a recurring subject in her paintings, offering a way to explore inwardness, vulnerability and the tension between exposure and retreat. She is drawn to the contrast between vivid colour and deep shadow, where intensity can coexist with stillness. Working through layers of paint, shifting contours and reworked surfaces, she allows recognisable forms to emerge, dissolve and give way to abstraction. This interplay gives her figures a strong physical presence while leaving their inner lives open to interpretation.

The human figure is often where a painting begins; colour, atmosphere and the physicality of paint take it somewhere less certain.  Recognisable forms can emerge through layers of vivid colour, then become obscured, interrupted or partly dissolved. I build the image, disrupt it, remove parts and rebuild it, allowing the surface to retain traces of what came before. The paintings are intuitive and physically worked, moving between recognition and ambiguity, presence and disappearance.  Colour carries much of the emotional weight: sometimes luminous and protective, sometimes visceral and intense. The result is work that remains recognisable enough to draw you in, but open enough not to tell you exactly what to see. 

ZANIMA is a name born from Zane and anima, the Latin word for soul. It also carries the meaning of something that interests us, captures our attention, or draws us in. A little of a name, a little of the soul, and an invitation to look a little closer and feel a little bit deeper.