Brisbane-born, Berlin-based artist Karla Marchesi employs the still life genre as a means through which to reflect upon socio-cultural anxieties of our age. Her paintings theatrically critique what it means to be human at this present moment under conditions of late capitalism and anthropocentrism, interweaving an allegoric deconstruction of ideological systems with autobiography, pathos and humour. Marchesi has Bachelor of Fine Art (2004) and Honours in Fine Art (2007) degrees from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, where she received the University Medal for academic excellence and the Honours Thesis Prize. Marchesi received the Philip Bacon Galleries Prize for Excellence in Drawing in 2003, enabling her to study for a semester at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, US. Marchesi has held solo exhibitions in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, and internationally in Singapore, Luxembourg and Germany.