CONTACT: karim.blanc@gmail.com

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BIO:
Surrealists, magical realism, symbolists, romantics, occultists, street artists, comics, are among my inspiration of the moment.

I’m a visual artist born under a traveller’s star.
My name is Karim Pierre Blanc, I was born in 1968 in Teheran, Iran.
I live and work in Vienna, Austria.

As my father worked for the french embassy I spent my childhood in Iran, Algeria, Lebanon, Burkina Faso, Norway and occasionally France. I started painting at eleven, in Norway because winters are really long there…

In 1989 I entered the«Beaux-Arts in Aix en Provence, in France where I focused on painting in the atelier of André Valensi and scenography with Jacques Hémery.

Strongly influenced by abstract expressionism and american art I decided to move to Canada in 1991.
In 1994 I graduated from the «University of Quebec In Montreal» (UQAM), Visual Arts Canada. I spent long hours of the canadian winter focusing on etching, lithography, silkscreen, photo and computers.
In 1997 I graduated with a Masters of Art Studies from UQAM, Montreal, Canada. With an installation project called «Everyday’s Suitcases» an artistic-sociological proposition.
I was granted from the «Art Council of Canada» in 2000, for an installation project called «Sic Transit» on the theme of transitory comfort spaces.

Meanwhile I have also been working as a cook, free-lance graphic designer, illustrator, Interior designer in Canada, France and Austria.

Since 2011 I live in Vienna, Austria where I am mainly painting, illustrating and cooking.

Today in my work I intend to create a climate of dream like state, not meaning beautiful and pleasant, but extra-ordinary, accurate, dense, clear while mysterious.
I apply hybrid layers of reality, going back and forward from abstraction to figuration.

I like to collaborate with others on projects involving different disciplines. I try to find a balance between periods in the studio, painting and drawing and periods of collective projects. My collaborations have been going from group art projects in galleries, to illustrating books, to painting performances with musicians and actors, to a nomadic social and interdisciplinary project with a caravan and cooking for poetry events.