About

Karine Laval is a French American Brooklyn-based artist born in Paris (France). She graduated from the CELSA - Paris Sorbonne in France, where she majored in communications and journalism. A self-taught artist, she completed her art, photography and design at the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union School of Art and the New School in New York shortly after moving to New York.

Laval’s multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, public art, and immersive installations. Her work explores the boundary between reality and perception, often shifting the familiar into the surreal. Through a distinctive use of color and a blend of analog and digital techniques, she investigates the materiality of images and the transformative power of the camera. Her recent work leans toward abstraction, dissolving form and blurring lines between photography, painting, sculpture, film, and performance.

COSMOS is the latest chapter in Laval's long-term project Heterotopia, which reimagines public and private gardens through analog manipulation and mirrors. With COSMOS, she turns her own garden on the North Fork of Long Island into an outdoor studio, slowly transforming it into a sustainable meadow and using the space as a site for plein air experimentation. The project merges landscaping, gardening, and art making, and is documented through stills and moving images, along with three-dimensional mirror-based works.

Laval’s latest project has been selected for major architectural installations in several new Dior stores, including the New York flagship on Madison Avenue and 57th Street (2025), as well as new boutiques in Beverly Hills (2025) and Osaka, Japan (2026). For the NYC store, she created a 10x20 ft image for a massive lightbox that is be the focal point of the Lily of the Valley Tea Salon inside Dior Maison.

Other large-scale commissions include public installations at 22 Bishopsgate in London (2021), in the NYC subway (2021), and at Hermès in New York City (2016).

Laval's work has been reviewed and featured in international publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Sunday Telegraph, Dazed & Confused, Le Monde, Le Figaro Magazine, Eyemazing, Next Level, EXIT, to name a few. Her work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, and internationally at such venues as the Palm Springs Art Museum and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (USA), the Sorlandet Art Museum in Kristiansand and the French Cultural Center in Oslo (Norway), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (France), and at several photo festivals throughout Europe and the US. Noticeable group exhibitions include ‘Peter Marino Collection’ at Peter Marino Art Foundation in Southampton, NY in 2021, ‘IN VIVO/The nature of nature’ at Museum Belvédère in The Netherlands in 2018, ‘Obsessions’ at Maison Particulière in Brussels (Belgium) and ‘Radical Color’ at the Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, OR (USA) in 2015, ‘31 Women in Art Photography’ curated by Jon Feinstein (Humble Art Foundation) and Natalia Sacasa (Luhring Augustine Gallery) at Hasted Kraeutler Gallery in New York, NY (USA) in 2012, and ‘Au Feminin – Women photographing Women’ at the at the Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris (France) in 2009. In 2014 Laval received the Jury’s Prize at the 6th ASVOFF International Film Festival in Rome for her short film State of Flux, which was later screened at Centre Pompidou in November 2014. Laval was a finalist in France’s Villa Medicis Hors Les Murs as well as the recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant. She was nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2016 and 2019. Other awards include Humble Art Foundation’s 31 Women in Art Photography (2011), Communication Arts Winner Awards in the Photography Annual in 2011 and 2019, PDN’s Top 30 Emerging Photographers of the Year (2005), and Magenta Foundation Emerging Photographers of the Year (2005 and 2009). Her first monograph Poolscapes was published by Steidl Verlag in 2018. Her second monograph, Anatomy of Desire, was published by 89books in 2019.

If you'd like to know more about a specific project or want to schedule a studio visit, please email karinelavalstudio@gmail.com.