Opening reception: March 4, 2026
Location: 195 Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002
Hours: Monday – Friday, 10 am – 6 pm, Saturday 12-5 pm & Sunday by appointment
Contact: caroline@voltzclarke.com | 917.292.6921
Press Release
Voltz Clarke Gallery is pleased to present Fluctuations, a solo exhibition, by Karen Tompkins.
Fluctuations, a series of acrylic paintings on canvas by Karen Tompkins, approaches reality not as a fixed image but as the world we perceive continually coming into being. Drawing on concepts from contemporary physics, particularly the notion of the quantum field as an invisible continuum of energy in constant fluctuation, Tompkins’ work translates this scientific speculation into material and optical experience. Rather than illustrating theory, the paintings invite viewers to register shifts in light and spatial depth over time.
Situated within a lineage that includes Agnes Martin’s disciplined attentiveness to structure, Mary Corse’s investigations into reflective surfaces and ambient light, and Olafur Eliasson’s explorations of perception and natural systems, Fluctuations explores these concerns through the medium of painting. The series also engages the legacies of Light and Space, post-minimalist material inquiry, perceptual abstraction, and systems-based art, while insisting on the continued relevance of painting as a site of experimentation.
The paintings are created through layered pigments and luminous grounds that respond to ambient light. As the light changes and viewers move, the images reorganize: color shifts, depths open, and apparent structures dissolve into vibration. Fluctuations is an active, temporal process rather than a passive image. At a moment when contemporary art increasingly addresses ecological, technological, and cosmological systems, Fluctuations proposes painting as a speculative instrument—a laboratory for testing how matter, time, and perception intersect. Each work operates as a dynamic field in which states such as potential, entanglement, and collapse coexist, resisting fixed resolution or hierarchy.
Through this series, the London based artist seeks to slow the act of viewing and heighten the awareness of the viewer at the threshold between the visible and the invisible. The selection of paintings invite the viewer to encounter the universe not as something distant or abstract, but as
something ever-changing and intimate.
Karen Tompkins grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Art in Rome, Italy before continuing her education at the Pratt Institute Graduate School in Brooklyn, NY. She currently resides and works in London. Tompkins has exhibited in New
York, Florida, London, and Rome.
Selected Works
