Karen LaMonte

Born December 14, 1967


is an American artist known for her life-size sculptures in ceramic, bronze and cast glass as well as her large scale monotype prints.Her art deals largely with the central themes of beauty and loss, exploring the fragility of the human condition through a sartorial lens.

"The dress belonged to a moment when the wearer was, to use an expression of Proust’s, en fleur. The dress belonged to a certain moment of history, which it preserves—it shows how women dressed for certain occasions at a certain moment. The wearer will have aged. She looked like that then, but, if she is still alive, it is certain she will not look that way now. There is a double melancholy—the melancholy of fashion, and the melancholy of bodily change, from nubility to decrepitude. The breasts have fallen, the waist thickened, the skin has lost it transparency and luminescence. The poignancy of LaMonte’s dresses is a product of two modes of change in which we participate as human beings, composed, as we are, of flesh and meaning. Their poetry is the poetry of beauty and loss."