Karen Azoulay

Azoulay's artwork includes colorful sculpture, performance and installations.^[3] Her interdisciplinary works, which explore language, natural elements, and the female form, are often captured in film or photography finished with collage or paint.^[4] She uses ephemeral materials such as fresh flowers, clay, and her own body.^[4] In her exhibition Semi-Precious (2019) at Essex Flowers, Azoulay drew inspiration from a skeleton of an 11th-century German woman, who was found to have remnants of lapis lazuli on her teeth, indicating she was likely a manuscript illuminator.^[5] Azoulay's "Eating Flowers" motif, in which she consumes different flowers with dark, glitter-coated lips and teeth, explores ideas of vulnerability, nourishment, and decay.^[6]

Solo exhibitions include CUE Art Foundation in New York, curated by Glenn Ligon,^[7] Fire Tale, Four Gallery in Dublin,^[8] Deep, Deep Under the Sea, Mercer Union in Toronto,^[9] Sculpture After the Apocalypse, Primetime, Brooklyn,^[10] The Botanist's Mime, Dose Projects, Brooklyn,^[11] and Indexing the Leaves, Methodist Archives, Drew University in Madison, NJ.^[12]

In March 2023, Azoulay published a book on the Victorian language of flowers, titled Flowers and Their Meanings, The Secret Language and History of Over 600 Blooms.^[13] 

Published by Clarkson Potter (an imprint of Penguin Random House), the 248-page book includes a foreword by bestselling author Kate Bolick, a dictionary of over 600 flowers, an index organized by theme, and essays about the history of floriography. It is illustrated with a combination of nineteenth-century botanical illustrations and Azoulay's own photography.^[13]

The book expands upon the topic of a booklet Azoulay self-published in 2015, titled Flowers and their Meanings, which also includes her photography and a dictionary of Victorian flower symbolism.^[14][15]