2023 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow: Keren Kroul

Banner image: The Shape of Memory (detail), 2024. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 30’ feet. Composed of 45 sheets of Arches paper. All images courtesy of the artist's website, unless otherwise noted.

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This is the first in a series of articles profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2023 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2023 cohort includes Tia-Simone Gardner, Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, Sieng Lee, Mark Ostapchuk, and Lindsay Rhyner.

Their two-year fellowship will culminate this spring with a McKnight Discussion Series:

Thursday, March 27, 2025: Adriel Luis (Curator of Digital and Emerging Practice, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center) in conversation with Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, and Mark Ostapchuk

Thursday, April 10, 2025: Katie Pfohl (Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Detroit Institute of Art) in conversation with Tia-Simone Gardner, Sieng Lee, and Lindsay Rhyner

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Photo by Rachel Nadeau, courtesy of the artist.

 

It’s difficult to fully understand art that you haven’t seen in person. You experience artwork with your body, especially in relation to scale, and it leaves an imprint on your memory. I can remember feeling engulfed by Richard Serra’s steel walls, for instance, or nearly swallowed up standing in front of Lee Bontecou’s black voids. I remember how small Starry Night looked in person and how the physical painting seemed like such an artifact of the artist’s own hand. Viewing artwork through pixels or print alone only gets you half-way to really seeing it; you’re kept, invariably, at a distance.

Bodily scale is very important to Keren Kroul’s work — she makes intricately detailed watercolor abstractions that can span entire gallery walls — but I think distance may actually be her primary interest. Distance not from the physical work (Kroul gets up close and personal with every inch of her paintings) but from the histories and the memories she takes as her subject. They belong, in a sense, to someone else.

Kroul spoke to me last month over Zoom from her home studio in Florida, where she relocated this past summer to escape the Minnesota winters her family has endured for the last 18 years. With both of her kids grown and off to college and a husband who can work remotely from anywhere, Kroul found a job outside of Fort Lauderdale teaching high school art, which she had done for years in Minneapolis. “It’s just my jam,” she says. “I love it so much.”

“And honestly, I feel like in Minneapolis, we all had our pride flags in the rooms; we all use pronouns. There was a basic understanding. And I feel like I’m more needed here. I have students who are not even my students that will come and eat their lunch in my room because it’s a safe space for them.”

Kroul is no stranger to picking up and moving. Born in Israel, she moved with her parents to Mexico City and then on to Costa Rica during high school. Her father grew up in Argentina and fled to Israel during the Dirty War where he met Kroul’s mother, a first generation Israeli born to parents from Austria by way of Romania. In other words, she has roots all over the world. When I ask if she has one place she considers home, she takes a beat to consider. “It’s interesting. I think it’s a combination of things. It really matters who I'm talking to, what language I'm speaking, and where I am. I feel different connections to different places.”

 

The Shape of Memory (detail), 2024. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 30’ feet. Composed of 45 sheets of Arches paper.

 

Maybe there’s a connection there to her work, as well, which shows a certain penchant for compartmentalization. On the studio wall behind her hang several new paintings still in process: floating pink flowers on sheets of 400 lb, 22 x 30” Arches — the fancy kind with the deckled edges. It's a manageable size, perfect for a drawing table and not nearly as formidable as a large, empty canvas. Each of these single sheets, however, will eventually become individual tiles in a much larger mosaic.

Her most recent completed work went on view in a solo exhibition in early 2024 at the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University. On the wall, a grid of these sheets, three tall and fifteen long, spanned a full thirty feet — a mural-sized work of minute detail.

 

The Shape of Memory, 2024. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 30’ feet. Composed of 45 sheets of Arches paper.

 

In the gallery, with only the artwork and a wall label to go on, it would be anyone’s guess what the piece is about. Across the thirty foot run, a flurry of red flower petals blow in from the left across a cloudscape of blue-violet foam. A monumental slab of rock juts through the center, giving way on the right to an island of little structures. A coiling, complicated mass of ropes and strands winds and wends throughout the entire composition, overlaid like floaters in your eyesight and rendered in watery gray fishscales. It’s all a mighty tumult, made more orderly by the gridded layout of its 45 individual sheets of paper. If you had to guess, the work seems tied perhaps to cellular biology, which actually isn’t too far off. The small clusters of buildings are the most concrete clue, a grounding bit of representation. The endless, braided ropes are a second, whipping and curving like strands of DNA under a microscope.

The work is titled The Shape of Memory, and here Kroul's interest in distance comes into focus. The memories she is taking as her subject are a tangle of both hers and her grandmother’s; the history she is painting is that of the Holocaust. Kroul’s family suffered greatly in the concentration camps — many were murdered — so perhaps these coiling, undulating strands could be read as a dark sense of lineage, an epigenetic thread of anguish and perseverance. But there is an even more specific inspiration for this motif, which has run continuously through Kroul’s works for the past decade or more: two braids of human hair kept safe in a drawer.

They belonged to her great aunt Judith, the twin sister of Kroul's maternal grandmother Thea. The pair were identical, and Judith wore her hair in braids so that people could tell them apart. Austrian Jews living in Romania, their whole family was split up during the war and sent to different Nazi concentration camps in Ukraine. The sisters were only teenagers when they were sent to a camp called Djurin, where they worked hard labor and where, at the age of 18, Judith died of typhus. As it happened, the camp was liberated only a month later. Thea managed to survive and kept her sister’s braided locks with her the rest of her life until her own passing in 2010, some 65 years later. The braids, in the end, were buried with her.

Kroul was always very close to her grandmother, and during trips to visit her in Israel, Kroul would sit and listen closely to her stories. “I have a very visceral memory of opening the little drawer next to her bed,” she says. “And there was this little cloth with two human braids, and it just freaked me out so much.”

 

An Architecture of Longing, #2, 2021. Watercolor on paper, 60 x 46”

 

“She basically carried her sister with her all her life and had enormous survival guilt, obviously. But in all the stories, the sister was the beautiful one, and the sister was the smart one, and the sister was the brave one.

“It dawned on me like, wow, I'm here because my grandma survived. That's how it started really, with thinking about me as a mom with my children, and what stories am I deciding to pass down to them? How am I telling these stories?”

Kroul is not the first artist to struggle under the terrible weight of archiving their family’s experience of the Holocaust. Art Spiegelman wrote and drew his parents' story into the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, weaving together the artist’s difficult relationship with his father in the present with the horrors his parents and so many others endured in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Auschwitz itself. In a scene from the second book, in the midst of a brutal narrative about day-to-day life in the camp, the artist turns to his wife and laments, “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams.”

The Shape of Memory is a much less literal work of art than Maus, but Kroul wrestles with the same issues: how to simultaneously document one family, truthfully and respectfully, within the grinding wheels of history and come away with a work of art that speaks to the present moment as well. She answers with scale, both physically and conceptually, using something as small and as personal as two locks of hair to serve as a stand-in for the greatest atrocity of the 20th century and the memories that managed to survive it. Now the physical enormity of the installation makes sense: “I knew for sure that it needs to be bigger than my body,” she says. “It just feels like I'm thinking about things that are so overwhelming for me that the work needs to represent that in its physicality. It needs to feel like, when I'm standing in front of it, that it's too much.”

 

The Shape of Memory (detail), 2024. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 30’ feet. Composed of 45 sheets of Arches paper.

 

The scale of Kroul’s installation works in other ways, too. There’s the obvious architectural imposition of a mural-sized installation — a formidable presence that disguises the fragility of watercolor on paper. From there, the individual sheets of paper break the work up into digestible segments, as though viewing Kroul’s drawing through the panes of a window. Up close, a third level of obsessive, cellular detail emerges. Each plait of hair, each interlocking shape, each little bubble of structured quantum foam has been painted with the tiniest of watercolor brushes. At one point in our conversation, Kroul proudly holds up a 3/4”-wide flat brush she bought long ago and still has never used — it’s just too big for her tiny, mammoth paintings. It is microscopic work on a macro scale, not unlike an individual life lived within the cacophony of world history. Judith’s braids stretch for miles, a token akin to the piles of shoes left behind at other Nazi camps — crushing metonymical stand-ins for all the lives lost, the families wiped out.

“To connect it to today, I mean the past year, honestly, I've been really struggling with this,” Kroul says, referencing the previous fifteen months of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. “Here I am [in early 2024], I just finished this big work that was all about my family but also the effect of the horrific decisions that humans make against other humans, and then my people are committing genocide.” The title of her St. Kate’s exhibition puts it more simply: Even Now. The past is all too present.

“But I couldn't process it through the work,” she admits. “It's not enough just to remember, right? It's not enough just to say, wow, I'm so overwhelmed and helpless because I have these histories of horrific things when literally I am a murderer and my people or my country are, too. I mean, it's beyond any words what's going on.”

 

Hasenfell-Himmel, 2024. Single channel video projection on gallery floor with audio. The title translates to "hare's pelt sky."

 

Even Now also featured a video, though Kroul is hesitant to call the piece a work of art. Her humility around any sense of expertise comes up several times, particularly when she tells the story of hosting a watercolor workshop for a dedicated group of painters, who ended up scolding her for her bad habits. “I really feel every time I'm in here and I'm grabbing my brushes and whatever, I do feel like I have no idea,” she says earnestly. “And it's like I'm pulling one over on everyone, really. What do I know how to use a brush?”

The same humility exists around her subject matter, leaving her — much like Spiegelman — wondering, “Is this really okay that I'm doing this? That I'm kind of using someone else's experience, trying to be respectful and trying to really focus on what I remember, not pretending I know what they went through.” For the video piece, Kroul decided to widen the tent and bring her family in to help. She asked her grandmother’s every living descendant to go outside, look up at the sky, and send her a video of what they see. The result is an 18-minute montage of blue, gray, white, and black skies from all over the world, projected in a circle onto the rocky concrete floor of the gallery. The film's duration is a nod to Jewish numerology, in which eighteen signifies life. For the soundtrack, Kroul chose a poem by Paul Celan, whose work she came across thanks to Colombian artist Doris Salcedo.

As it turns out, Kroul discovered, Celan had also grown up a Romanian Jew, not far from her grandmother’s home — a strange bit of coincidence. He too had lost his parents in the Holocaust and had survived the camps himself. To record the poem in its original German, Kroul called her mother, who grew up speaking the language, and another layer of kismet emerged. “I'm telling her about it,” Kroul recalls, “and she's like, oh, when your grandma was dying, I would sit and read poetry to her. She loved it. And Paul Celan was one of her favorite poets.”

The poem, titled “In the Daytime,” begins with the line “Hare’s pelt sky. Even now” — from which Kroul took her show’s title. In the gallery, her mother’s voice slowly repeats the six-line poem over and over again, interspersed with the noise of wind and children in the distance, a nod to the cyclical nature of our days and our history. It feels fitting: a dreary, rabbit-fur gray is how most of us envision the waking life of every day behind barbed wire. But, as Kroul points out, that is its own kind of fabricated memory, mostly from Hollywood films and black-and-white photos. Of course there were days when a whole sky full of sunshine fell across the camps, just as the skies on the gallery floor include all shades of blue and violet. The most impactful color in the exhibition, however, is the deep red of the flowers floating through her drawings.

“One day I came in,” Kroul says, “and I was just looking at all these pieces of paper, and I was like, oh my gosh, it's just all grays and blues, and it's so depressing. I need some color here. This is just too much.”

 

The Shape of Memory (detail), 2024. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 30’ feet. Composed of 45 sheets of Arches paper.

 

After googling wildflowers from her grandmother’s region of Romania, she landed on a sweet pea, purely for the color it would bring to the composition. Here again, a powerful kismet was at work: this was the same flower, she would discover, that the Nazis used to torture her great-grandfather Izhak at Vapniarka, another Nazi camp in Ukraine. Her mother’s sister confirmed it, as Kroul recalls: “Grandma always said that when they were kids, and they would run in the fields, they were always told don't touch the flowers because they're poisonous. This is a flower that apparently, if you ingest it, it creates paralysis of the limbs. And basically the Nazis were trying to figure out how much to use to create paralysis.”

Her great-grandfather managed to survive the poisonings, and after being liberated from the camp, he spent his time bearing witness to survivors’ wounds to help them secure reparations. “My mom has these horrific memories of all these deformed people going to talk to her grandpa,” Kroul remembers — another memory of a memory — before our conversation drifts back to the present moment.

The pink sweet pea flower petals continue on in the drawings tacked to her studio wall, but the braids do not. After over a decade of winding Judith’s braids through a variety of works, she says, they can be allowed to rest. “I feel like really with the St. Kate's piece, I feel like I finished that. I feel like I don't need to dig any deeper in there.”

 

Top: Smoke Cloud #4, 2018. Watercolor on paper, 23 x 30”. Bottom: Green, 2015. Watercolor on paper, 60 x96”. Composed of 8 sheets of Arches paper.

 

The work now, turns to something less distant. “I feel like I have to address this feeling that I've had for the past year,” she says, “of this immense sadness about how things are happening in the world. And also coming from a family that has been on both sides, where the decisions of humans created so much despair, and now we are creating so much despair. I don't know, it's so depressing, but I feel like there's something there that I just haven't been able to access yet.”

There is a difference between processing and bearing witness, I think, and I wonder if distance might be the key there, too. Maybe it’s that one atrocity has ended but the other drags on. Time will tell if the ceasefire agreed to this week will hold and what shape the memory of this period’s suffering and resilience will take in the decades to come.  Bearing witness is an imperative; processing, perhaps, is a privilege.

And maybe it’s a form of abstraction itself. They say that memories change every time we revisit them, growing and morphing into memories of themselves. Our job, as the saying goes, is to never forget, but as Spiegelman once told an interviewer, “Memory is a very fugitive thing.” The truths we come to know can only ever be partial, especially when they are not entirely our own. They map mysteriously, microscopically, onto our strange little brains — gray as a hare’s pelt — sometimes in great swirls and dark clouds, sometimes in fragments and jumbles, but sometimes too in bright skies and strong, beloved braids. From a far enough distance, maybe they will take a firmer shape. ◼︎

 

Kroul's at-home studio in Florida with a work in progress. Photo courtesy of the artist's Instagram.

 

To see more of Keren Kroul's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @kerenkroul.

Stay tuned for the next McKnight Fellow Profile, of painter Mark Ostapchuk.