Kate Shepherd Lineaments Kate Shepherd Lineaments

Kate Shepherd Lineaments Kate Shepherd Lineaments Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery Galerie Lelong Contents 7 Kate Shepherd: Lineaments Paul Bright 13 Paintings 22 Installation Views 33 Top Ten Peter J. Russo 37 Works on Paper and Installation Views 56 Biography 60 List of Illustrations 62 Colophon Kate Shepherd: Lineaments unmodulated and usually of intense or Paul Bright saturated hues heightened by their highly reflective surfaces. A line placed on those surfaces energizes the elements in an inter action that belies their apparent simplicity, reminding us that even the most carefully wrought twodimensional representation— Igor Stravinsky’s famous remark about of space, or as space—is an abstraction of music’s inability to express anything, of three-dimensional experience. After all, two expression not being an “inherent prop hues set next to one another already form erty” of it, came to mind as I spent time a spatial illusion. The even, glossy, and with the paintings and drawings of Kate fathomless colors of Shepherd’s panels are Shepherd that comprise the exhibition paradoxically hand-applied in nearly every Lineaments. Regardless of the impulses instance. The seams created where panels that motivate them, in an age of “over abut, as well as the clean but unfinished sharing” her works are not selfindulgent edges of the wood supports of those pan or narcissistic. They are not “about” her, els, reveal their structure and reassert their exactly, or at least overtly. Stravinsky later object-ness. From a distance, the lines on- clarified his statement, saying that music’s planes can appear ruled and mechanical. As most important qualities are “supra we move closer, the austere linearity and personal” and that “music expresses itself” enameled planes of the paintings reverse (my emphasis). Despite painting’s very polarity to become hand-brushed lines different forms and parameters, I believe on fat, haptically engaging surfaces. Like much of Shepherd’s work achieves this par Mondrian’s paintings, which often appear ticular kind of selfexpression. The paintings as merely flat planes of color when seen realize her intention to present the visual from a distance or in reproduction, viewed results of her investigative modus rather in person they reveal that they were made than function as barometers to register the with brushes, without taped boundaries, vagaries of emotion. their pentimenti more visible; they feel alive and organic. Kate Shepherd’s paintings reflect the artist’s deep interest in some of the funda Two paintings, Figure Plane, thread in, #7 mental elements of twodimensional art tool (pure tulip red) and Initial Plain Blue making. In its bluffness, her work reveals Building w/ J catenary tool (pure custom an essential paradox of drawing; lines, bic) (both 2015), are almost cheeky in their cooperating with their attendant grounds, play of space and illusion, demonstrating do “express themselves” as lines and how little is needed to create a sense of planes per se and, alternately, they are volume and dimensionality, and how perceived as forms and volume. In fact, the easily that implied space can collapse leitmotiv of Shepherd’s work is this oscil back into flatly planar abstraction (pp. lation—sensed as an alternating current— 18, 22). An unlikely evocation of plane, between a literal directness and a meta figure, ground, and space,Figure Plane, phoric, sometimes even poetic, illusionism. thread in, #7 tool (pure tulip red) presents Her paintings are typically composed of a delineated parallelogram on a red two or more vertically stacked and joined field, with an additional line drooping panels, sometimes of different color or tentatively into it like a just-cut string. We value. These enameled planes upon which can, when we suspend our disbelief like the lines drape, course, and deploy are that tendrilled line, see it that way. Then, 7 when our “rational” consciousness, our be figurative, of which we are even less Shepherd’s twodimensional paintings print, indeed employs etching ink rather “knowing” look, banishes the illusion, it consciously aware: we can respond bodily on panel establish a somewhat different than paint and depicts a chunky modern flattens back to lines on a plane of intense and psychologically to a work’s tactile correspondence with our bodily selves. ist sculpture with just enough indication color, the “thread” seemingly mistaken or physical qualities. This is clear when You don’t fully understand a large Jackson of mass and texture to be apprehended or out of place. Initial Plain Blue Building encountering Shepherd’s suspended Pollock painting until it subsumes you, until “bodily.” w/ J catenary tool (pure custom bic) is wire drawing in space, Chiseled Stone you feel how it allows you to enter into its The ochre enamel that forms the ground formed of two parallel—or overlapped— (2015), which coaxes us into a physical deepening, overlapping loops of gesticulate of ALVAR AALTO4halvesstacked_thread2no- parallelograms, which can be read relationship with it (p. 54). This 13-foot- paint that are the traces of a body in stand.s8 (sky grass, wire sculpture) (2014) illusionistically as transparent wall panels, tall work takes us a step away from our motion across a canvas plane. While Kate references the natural wood color of the with a section of a catenary line seemingly normally proprioceptive, or dimensionally- Shepherd’s work is in most ways very architect/designer’s work, just as the blue draped over or in between the panels from sensed, selves. Characteristic of Shepherd’s different from this hypothetical Pollock, in Initial Plain Blue Building w/ J catenary the left. works, it indicates by minimal means her works do set themselves resolutely in tool (pure custom bic) is specifically keyed an enclosure of volume and a floating relation to the viewer. Many of the artist’s to the ink of the pen, and as perhaps the Figuration is the kind of illusion Kate planarity of delineated abstract shapes, paintings in this exhibition are large, most red in Figure Plane, thread in, #7 tool (pure Shepherd’s work quietly but insistently visually snapping back and forth between ranging from a person’s natural height tulip red) refers to Mondrian (p. 20). ALVAR engages in throughout Lineaments. Her the two but grounded by line. That line to that of a traditional fulllength portrait; AALTO4halvesstacked_thread2nostand. paintings in most instances investigate how vaguely indicates the shifting contour of a they maintain a proportional relationship s8 (sky grass, wire sculpture) takes as much visual information is both necessary human form, depending on one’s view of it. with our bodies or the dimensions we its ostensible “subject” Aalto’s famous and sufficient for a viewer to conjure a Chiseled Stone’s considerable height and encompass. Relatedly, our presence in their organic modernist furniture—things that figure, without resorting to “expressive” lack of mass confound our visual, physical, pictorial space is implied by our reflection bodies sit in. However, as in womantorse line, without modeling and shading, and spatial relationship to the work as we in their seemingly liquid surfaces, which daz3d2 Draw -On- 1.lrfr(three scenes), the without detailed depiction. What is meant move around it. Composed of sections of push us a bit further back from them while linearity of the work seems to indicate the when we say a work is “figurative”—what clothes hangers of the same length—linear simultaneously drawing our eye past those motion of a figure, here getting up and constitutes “figuration” in art? Like so modules—its crimped joints recall the surfaces and deeper into the color space, moving out of repose rather than inhab many things, degrees of figurativeness painted lines and terminuses of Shepherd’s complicating our interaction with the iting a seat. And as in the triptych, the can be provisionally located on an arc panel paintings. painted figures. artist’s selfimposed constraint to use only or a spectrum, from very direct and Although suspended in two dimensions, One such work, the triptych womantorse variable length segments of straight lines, recognizable depictions of form—especially the figure in the paintingViolet Grey daz3d2 Draw-On -1.lrfr(three scenes) (2014), even when creating curves, imparts a sense the human form—to works that may at first African Rabbit Skin (2010) most echoes opens with a vertical tangle of lineaments of torqued energy. seem to have little relation to that form but Chiseled Stone (p. 17). It is austere, tall and in the first panel, unfolding sequentially to onto which we project “figures,” as when attenuated, seemingly flayed and hung in the seemingly vectorized lines indicating The painting I Silver, February Snow (2007) seeing recognizable shapes in clouds. its indeterminate space. Stretching from the gesture and contour of a human form is disarmingly straightforward: light diago The word figure itself has a multiplicity the panel’s top to bottom edges, the central (p. 23). These three blue-black panels could nal marks on graphite-shimmering sur of meanings and nuances. A surprising placement of this figure feels hieratic. serve as a summation of the exhibition’s faces, building up and congesting in places number of these can be applied to Kate The painting relates strongly to the wire figurative theme: at what point can we like sleet (p. 15). Shepherd’s approach here, Shepherd’s delineated forms: a bodily drawing as seen from certain angles but as perceive the emergence of a figure from the while dryly unsentimental, is reminiscent shape (or its depiction), an investigation or a distillation of a drawing in space. In its non-figural? Where are we in relation to it? of the childlike literalness of the way rain is calculation, a surmise, a shape defined by quiet rotation of space, Central Park, double Each panel contains the same number of depicted in the paintings of Van Gogh (La one or more lines in two dimensions, or by cut @ 4, silver over black (2014), a work of linear elements, but differently deployed.

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