Throughlines: Jason Karolak and Ara Koh

Washington, D.C

PFA is pleased to announce Throughlines, pairing the work of Jason Karolak and Ara Koh. This exhibition presents the intersection of two distinct material languages: the chromatic optical precision of Jason Karolak’s paintings alongside Ara Koh’s corporeal, calcified ceramics. Together, they dismantle the logic of the grid, offering a form-responsive inquiry into how structural armatures can be both inhabited and unravelled.

Throughlines will be on view at PFA–Washington D.C., located at 1932 9 ½ Street NW, Washington D.C., 20001 from April 11 through May 28, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 11, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.

Inviting viewers into constructed worlds, Ara Koh and Jason Karolak propose alternate approaches to reorienting around the cartesian grid. This exhibition encourages navigation of landscapes where geometry becomes visceral. The grid is taken as a prompt, a throughline, before being upended through gestural and conceptual intervention. In Koh’s work the grid is expanded beyond the flat plane, becoming intertwined and reconstituted in sculptural form. Karolak’s backlit paintings glow with a Y2K-internet-era nostalgia of exponentially expanding space which recedes and bounces across his meticulously layered surfaces. When situated alongside each other—at the intersection of architecture, the body, and the reclamation of space—a dialogue begins. Both artists share a preoccupation with the grid as a foundational device and a repetitive, labor-intensive methodology that translates internal or intellectual logics into external form.

Situated firmly within a lineage of geometric colour work, Karolak’s stylistic approach to form and colour recalls something of Brazilian Neo-Concretism through his expectation of forms holding an internal logic, which materialises and activates through looking. In oil on linen and ink on paper, he maps out rigid shapes, creating a sgraffito of lines and blocks. The works bring the eye within the frame, directing the viewer to construct and create imagined maps and pathways of navigation. The paintings can be seen as sports plays, route directives or glowing remnants of arcade screens. The physicality of colour hues in each piece is used as a set of mimetic aids, facilitating a comprehension process of recalling and reconstitution through looking, as though to visualise Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Hyperreal’.

In the gestural, haptic configurations that Koh presents, surface and structure are shown to be brittle possibilities. With fired clay ribbons that form writhing cubes, Koh gathers, piles and entangles. Medusa-esque in their slipperiness, the sculptures are glazed and precisely placed, balancing an improvisatory quality in their form with the assertion of their hard material properties. Koh approaches clay as a vehicle for memory and meditation, translating the amorphous into rigid, architectural forms. Her sculptures negotiate surface and presence, inviting physical orienting of the viewer in relation to the structures presented. Through the conflation of built landscapes and the organic materiality of her sculptures, Koh’s work muses on interconnected systems reminiscent of Deleuze’s rhizome theory.

Together, the presentation combines Karolak’s flattened, scratched grids envisioning future nostalgias with Koh’s understated structural provocations, creating an environment of spatial inquiry. Each artist’s preoccupation with space engages a navigation of built environments, whether physical, digital, psychological, or imagined. Through their puzzling, Karolak and Koh present works that evidence structures not as static frameworks but as living systems. Thus, the exhibition calls on viewers to orient and recapitulate around visual signals, offering a pertinent reminder that perception is a physical act of construction.