Katrin Aason: The Alchemy of Pigments
May 10 - June 21, 2025
Opening Reception: May 10, 4-6pm
Artist talk: May 31, 11am
Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to present The Alchemy of Pigments, our first solo exhibition with Costa Rican artist Katrin Aason. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery from May 10 to June 21, with an opening reception on May 10 from 4-6pm, and artist talk on March 31 at 11am.
Propelled by her reverence for tradition and refusal to maintain the typical divisions between craft and art histories, Katrin Aason has spent the past several years developing a distinctive visual language. She weaves references both ancient and modern, combining materials, colors, and patterns into her intricate textile works. She has closely studied Mayan, Incan, and Aztec textiles; the present-day weaving processes practiced in Puebla, Mexico and the Sacred Valley in Peru; and the work of 20th-century artists like Bridget Riley and Annie Albers—women at the vanguard of geometric abstraction and material exploration.
Aason’s fabric paintings, or modern pictorial weavings, are elusive and evocative explorations of sacred geometry—of the essential, the timeless. Aason creates her designs on the page dot by dot and line by line before hand-dyeing the cotton she uses to make her weavings. In her latest pieces, she uses exclusively natural dyes, including black tea; cochinilla (an insect dye); onion; avocado pits; cuculmeca (a medicinal root); and añil, or indigo. The resulting colors are subtle but sumptuous, and Aason leans into shades of indigo, one of the oldest pigment dyes in the world, to evoke global cultural histories and emphasize the importance of the color in the natural world—the blue of sky, of water. But no matter the scale of the individual piece, the effect of Aason’s work is intimate. The pieces don’t have titles but codes, leaving room for the viewer to interpret each shade of brown and blue, each thoughtful manipulation of the material.
Katrin Aason is a non-figurative textile artist based in Costa Rica. After showing alongside Cuban artist Eduardo Abela Torras during the XIII Havana Biennale in 2019, Aason shifted from figurative painting to geometric abstraction with alternative materials like ribbon and textiles. Her current work delves into symbolism and the versatility of the weave, which transforms according to the viewer’s physical and psychological perspective. Aason has exhibited in museums and galleries in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, London, and the United States. Her largest solo exhibition to date, Más allá del Indigo, was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San Jose, Costa Rica in 2024.