“I love Karabenick’s art activism on Geoform. If you don’t know the site you should take a look. It’s rich with many artist interviews and loads of images. Karabenick’s one-woman crusade to educate about artists who make this type of work is generous and a great public service.”

—Roberta Fallon, theartblog.org, June 2008

“Julie Karabenick‘s paintings mine the infinte richness of a single rectilinear form. There is  nothing meditative about the work—indeed, Karabenick consciously subverts the symmetry of her geometric endeavor—but each composition holds itself in easy equipoise.”

—Joanne Mattera, online catalog essay for “Luxe, Calme, et Volupté,” Marsha Wood Gallery, 2007

“Don’t miss the group exhibition ‘ORDER(ed)’ at the Gallery Siano, on view until June 17. It will open your eyes to all the possible ways geometric forms relate to the entire spectrum of emotions encountered in life … I left the gallery convinced this is what every exhibition should encompass.”

—Anne Fabbri review of “ORDER(ed),” Art Matters, June, 2006 (curated by Julie Karabenick, Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, PA, 2006)

“I suppose this could be the anti-entropy show: The artist as warrior against the forces of inertia.”

and

“Julie Karabenick’s paintings, with bars of quiet color and tiny squares of what looks like confetti, evoke systems and relationships. ‘Composition 61′ suggests that life is a cornucopia of big and small, slow and fast, weak and strong. Some will be anchors while others bungee around freely, taking risks and providing energy. The glue that holds it all together is relationships—one object touches another and helps it maintain its place. Question is, who are the anchors and who the free spirits? Do the large anchor the tiny—or are the tiny the sheep dogs herding the big? In this mutable world, order is achieved variously.”

—Roberta Fallon, catalog essay for “ORDER(ed)” (curated by Julie Karabenick, Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, 2006

“Karabenick is an accomplished abstract artist whose work explores the communicative power of basic geometric forms. For the show at Gallery Siano, she has gathered seventeen artists from the US and Canada (including five from Philadelphia) who share her interest in and commitment to the modernist tradition of geometric abstraction. This elegant and focused survey gives the viewer an opportunity to appreciate the richness and diversity of geometric abstraction today.”

—Krystyna Warchol review of “ORDER(ed),” Key to Philadelphia, May 1-14, 2006 (curated by Julie Karabenick, Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, PA, 2006)

“A psychologist by training, Karabenick is intrigued by the long history of abstract pattern in art making and its continuing hold on the human mind, perhaps reflecting something basic to our mental make-up. The show in Philadelphia is her second exhibit of this sort of work.”

—Libby Rosof review of “ORDER(ed),” fallon and rosof artblog (curated by Julie Karabenick, Gallery Siano, Philadelphia, PA, 2006) May 17, 2006

“Julie Karabenick makes incredible paintings that hum with color and contrast, in a sea of geometric forms. For the past six years, she has been working on her “Compositions” series. In these paintings, balance and harmony coexist amongst tension, activity, and unevenness.”

—Kyle Norris, “Julie Karabenick’s Geometric Abstractions,” Current Magazine, April, 2006

“Julie Karabenick … takes the constructivist grid and explodes it. Using a lexicon of only squares and rectangles, beginning with a square module within a square field, Karabenick varies the dimensions of these basic shapes, her practice intent on proving the infinite diversity of purposeful limitation. The colors are flat, restrained but when juxtaposed, create their own scintillation. Through a system of carefully calculated color interactions, a kind of optical chain reaction, Karabenick’s pixellated pointillism gives a new spin to dynamic equilibrium.“

and

“There is a wonderfully wide range of sensibilities in these paintings, from stripes to grids to variations and combinations of geometric figures that are straight and cured, hard-edged and soft, analytical and expressive, simple and complex. As a psychologist and artist, Karabenick is fascinated by the primal power that geometric figures continue to exert. For Karabenick, who is passionate about geometric form and pattern, one impulse for organizing ‘Engaging the Structural’ was to show the diversity of contemporary geometric abstraction and to marvel at the continued vitality of this historic tradition. Artists, Karabenick proves, are still drawn to the richness of its syntax, a syntax that seems inexhaustible.”

—Lilly Wei, “Geometry Reloaded,” NY Arts Magazine, May/June, 2005 (review of “Engaging the Structural” curated by Julie Karabenick, Broadway Gallery, New York, NY, April, 2005)

“Julie Karabenick’s is a careful, unsentimental mind in the midst of self-clarification. In each set of her explorations, one finds emotional depth, unity, and a complex internal conversation between subtly-wrought colors and shapes … The real heroes of the ‘Compositions’ series … are the tiniest: the pesky pixel squares that seem to multiply like little cells in unpredictable ways across the surface of the canvas. A tremendous amount of precise intuition has been crammed into these little squares—they generate minute imbalances that set the painting into a sense of incremental, provisional motion, rather than have it project ‘a priori’ perfection.”“

—Vivek Narayanan, “Julie Karabenick’s Systematic Freedoms,” NY Arts Magazine, January/February 2004

“In crafting these deceptively complicated artworks through a stylish aesthetic that demands  exactness and heart, Karabenick’s work gives us color and form shorn of superfluous adornment. Such a refinement is as rare as it is accomplished.“

—John Carlos Cantu, ”Intensity Meets Warm Colors in Precise, Vital Compositions,”The Ann Arbor News, June 16, 2002