FLASH REVIEWS KATY MORAN STUART SHAVE / MODERN ART- LONDON color of faded institutional wall paint. Paradoxically, it is the deceptive ap- pearance of an outdated idiom that makes Moran’s work conform to the post modern currents of recent paint- ing, in which Tomma Abts reenlivens Suprematist conventions and Sergej Jensen makes colorfield stain paint- ings, torn and shabby, as though they actually hailed from the ’60s. New is the inclusion of collaged elements. Lady bear with a back full of hair (2009) KATY MORAN, Pillow Drinker, 2009. Acrylic, oil pastel and collage on canvas, 38 x 46 cm. incorporates printed fragments of car- Courtesy Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London. toon imagery, as if to alert us to how Moran’s flamboyant painterly gestures themselves function as cartoonish Katy Moran’s small paintings at first symbols – sometimes almost figura- look like aged found objects, gestural tive – which make fun of their own semi-abstractions produced sometime expressionistic flourish. The generated in the ’60s. She uses techniques of era- intricate details defy analysis: tiny win- sure that mimic the effects of damage dows through which we peer into an and deterioration. Voluptuous acrylic imaginary world. Muffin Power (2009) brushstrokes are applied, allowed to gathers into a swirling Baroque space, dry, and then partially removed with with scraps of illustration cast ran- solvents and abrasion. There is a pen- domly into the mix as though they were chant for glossy grounds in a range of shredded in the heat of the process. soiled cream shades that resemble the Mark Prince 100 FlashArt JANUARY FEBRUARY 2010 KATY MORAN TATE ST IVES Summer 2009 Sara Hughes AN INTERVIEW WITH KATY MORAN Sara Hughes Sara Hughes even if it is not a conscious thing. The Can we talk about the particular fact that the studio is bare forces me focus of your show at Tate St Ives? It to begin again. kind of defines a moment, doesn’t it? SH So does it set off a linear Katy Moran progression across the paintings, as Yes, it comprises the diptychs, you make every work in relation to triptychs and single paintings which one other? I have made since the show at Tony Meier Gallery in San Francisco late KM Kind of, but as soon as I get last year (2008). going I always put the works up on the wall, and I am looking at them SH When you are making your all together to see how they fit as a paintings, there is usually an implicit group. It’s a very natural thing, I can’t dialogue between them as an idea help it; like someone co-ordinating an unfolds, which comprises the series outfit – whatever they might put on, or ‘batch’ of works. I am wondering if they would be thinking about each we are witnessing a transition into a choice in relation to whatever else new batch here, or whether it’s more they’d be wearing. I suppose that’s than that? why just recently they have begun to form triptychs or diptychs. So KM When I start painting after it’s really more like a conversation, a show like San Francisco, once because I am working on three or everything has left the studio, it’s four at a time. I might even grab some always the start of something else – of the dead canvases in the studio as TATE ST IVES Summer 2009 well. They could be really old things – intense, looser perhaps than works there is no specific loyalty to or focus I have seen before. The image in on anyone canvas at anyone time. general feels pared down. SH So you don’t begin with any fixed KM Yes, when you say pared down outcome in mind? there are a few, for example in Short Legs, I’m Coming and Travelling KM No, because sometimes I start Mercy, where I have washed off some out and I have an idea of what I am of the paint. With these I found myself going to do, but it never works out painting on the canvas and each time that way. It’s almost like scratching it just seemed there was too much around for something to get it going build up, too much paint on there. I and during this process I can be all just wanted to get rid of it. So I’d let over the place. it dry partially and then wash it off. Partly so I could lose control of the SH So, in relation to several works in image, see what might come from the show, including Travelling Mercy losing half the paint and keeping half 2008, Jaguar Nights 2008, Short Legs the paint. I’m Coming 2008 and Rinky’s 2008, can you talk a bit about how your SH There is a lovely tension between painterly language has evolved? chance and order there, but it also They all seem to share this unerring invokes a strong aspect of time. dynamism at the centre of the Melissa Gronlund in her essay for canvas that is animating a series of your exhibition at Middlesbrough associated forms, but they are less Institute of Modern Art (mima) last Overleaf: Short legs...I’m coming (Detail) 2008 TATE ST IVES Summer 2009 and overleaf: Short legs I’m coming 2008 Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas and wood panel in 3 parts 38 x 46cm 51 x 27.7cm 46 x 38cm Photo: Todd White © Katy Moran year, discussed the notion of how by someone else or at least represent material narratives are perhaps a version of yourself that you’ve embedded in the layers of your become unfamiliar with. With that paintings and how this encapsulates distance, I guess you begin to view both a sense of depth and time. Time them again more objectively rather compressed or frozen. She also than subjectively? talked about you working on them in one session. Do you still do this? KM Yes, you come across them with new eyes because you have no KM Well, now I have started bringing attachment. But it’s also helped by the in old works, I can’t really say I do frames I’ve started adding as well. I anymore. In Travelling Mercy, the one think that using the frames like a in the white frame was actually an old picture finder, going along and creating painting that I found, and I liked the a new picture by isolating certain surface and just painted on top of it. aspects, helps me to see something I am beginning to think again about completely different, something that I things, paintings I had rejected, and couldn’t see before because I only how they might be reused. saw this whole image restricted by the edge of the canvas. Cropping and SH It’s a bit like employing your own collaging allows me to lose that works as ready-mades or found restriction. I can surprise myself in objects. You’ve talked to me before this way and find new pictures. about that sense of divorce you sometimes feel from older work, and SH And you are using found frames how they feel like they’ve been made to do this? TATE ST IVES Summer 2009 Rinkys 2008 Acrylic on wood panel 40x50x3.5cm Courtesy of Stuart Shave Photo; Todd White © Katy Moran KM Yes, although I found a bit of from the studio. It is quite bizarre. But I wood the other day that I am taking love all that kitsch crap that you find in to the framers to have made into a markets – I do have to restrain myself frame, but normally I just find them. I a bit. The Hessian frame had been in try to accrue them in the studio, so I the studio for ages, I don’t even know can just pull them in and see if they where it came from. I just grabbed it work or not. But as I say they are part one day to isolate the painting. of the process, not just stuck on at the end. SH They have a distinctly domestic feel about them. When you are SH And they have a particular style choosing those frames, are you about them, a strong period aesthetic thinking about what they might in themselves – like the Hessian signify or what else they might bring frame on Travelling Mercy that looks to the work? How they might set your as if it’s been teleported from the painting off? 1970s; and that wonderful frame on Jaguar Nights with the metallic cigarbox KM To be honest, I am not corners and chunky chain. Was specifically going round looking for that an object that you painted over these things, I just seem to acquire or did you reuse that frame from them; and I am going on gut instinct, somewhere else? Does it have a what feels right. But I am playing personal history? with taste I suppose, an interest and amusement in peoples’ taste: KM No, it was from Goldbourne Road which does make me think about Market which is just round the corner domestic spaces and what people TATE ST IVES Summer 2009 put in them and why. And then I am of aesthetic, that slightly weathered, thinking about how that relates to dirty or tarnished look. But maybe contemporary painting and style now. without knowing it, it was a way of framing that central activity. It’s SH I like the way that in Short Legs, instinctive, it seemed right to do on the edge of the central canvas some of them and I don’t question it.