I often sense that something essential is missing when I limit myself to an artistic discipline with rigid boundaries. This is why the openness and versatility of mixed media resonate more deeply with my creative instincts.

I am inspired by the colours, shapes, and textures of various materials—especially as they undergo decay and transformation—which I use to express the evolving nature of environment, thought, emotion, and action.

Often, decline is the genesis of other things yet to come. It is the product of time, but it possesses its own discourse, function and beauty.

I have developed a process that seamlessly blends disparate materials, allowing me to position a work somewhere between the two-dimensionality of a photograph and the three-dimensionality of a sculpture. It is here that the medium asserts its importance, helping each work to be observed, touched and experienced.

About

Iván Karim (Cairo, Egypt) is a Spanish artist based in Malaga whose practice lies at the intersection of matter, memory and perception.

Following a career in publishing and audiovisual communication, his work has evolved towards a language that moves away from visual immediacy to focus on more elaborate processes, where the physical and the material take centre stage. His work draws on a sensitivity towards materials—particularly in their states of wear, transformation and decay. In this context, he explores the capacity of objects and surfaces as vessels for experience and emotion.

Through painting, ceramics, sculpture, photography and industrial design, Karim develops a multidisciplinary practice centred on the relationship between colour, form and matter, resulting in pieces that invite a more attentive and profound observation.