TURN Gallery is pleased to present Karyn Lyons' THE TRESPASSER AND OTHER TALES. This marks Lyons’ second solo exhibition at the gallery.


Incorporating art historical, cultural, and sartorial references, Lyons draws upon both her fictional and autobiographical worlds where childhood imagination meets adult possibilities. Exploring the emotional anxieties and inner vulnerabilities of adolescence, Lyons examines how our visual vocabulary remains rooted in these formative years, developing out of the movies, television, music and books we consumed. She portrays the moment in teenhood when a girl might read Nancy Drew mysteries by day and listen to The Rolling Stones at night. Lyons insinuates an inner struggle between the sacred and the profane.


In this new body of work, Lyons takes us on a journey of recollections; a sensual, fantastical, escape. The character based on her teenage self is both the hero and the anti hero. The girl in the rowboat could be launching her escape through a storm of troubled clouds, or perhaps she has broken through to explore the island where Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Haunted Palace” looms. Penetrating gothic candlelit rooms as a curious trespasser, Lyons’ loose brush strokes lure the viewer to encounter both the joy and the fear of the unknown. What is lurking in the darkness? Is it an unseen intruder or a metaphor for her new, promiscuous thoughts?


In her painting, Teenage Bacchanal (after Titian), Lyons recalls motifs from Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, layering romantic fantasies born from teenage infatuation upon a 15th-century landscape. Whether Lyons depicts her protagonist protectively clutching her diary or longing for the rotary phone to ring, nose deep in Jane Eyre or attempting to conceal her hickey with a chaste white blouse— she creates her intimate scenes with cinematic lighting and lush paint. Blending fantasy and reality, Karyn Lyons invites the viewer to examine their own adolescent vulnerabilities while also celebrating their inner rebel— the trespasser.


Karyn Lyons received a B.A. in Journalism from the American University in Washington, D.C. and did her post-graduate work at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Stems Gallery in Paris; TURN Gallery, and Journal Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include Galerie Hussenot, Carl Kostyál, Sim Smith, Timothy Taylor New York, and Fredericks & Freiser, among others.


THE TRESPASSER AND OTHER TALES will open Wednesday, November 1st from 6 - 8 pm. The show will be on view until December 9. We are located on the 2nd floor of 32 East 68th Street NY, NY 10065. The gallery is open Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm. For further information, contact Annika at ap@turngallerynyc.com.