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A Look at Katie Pratt

Katie Pratt

Kontainer Gallery

944 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012

January 25, 2008 - February 29, 2008

The visitor to Katie Pratt’s second solo exhibition at Kontainer encountered a set of paintings whose content was a matter of proximity. From afar, the canvases read as so many familiar, if clearly deft, gestures of painterly abstraction—their affect dependant on a predictable grammar of scale, hue, and composition in the most literal sense. Even from this distance, some of the work’s finer qualities were clear: Pratt’s at once elegant and surprising sense of color, her restrained approach to the project of filling the canvas with aesthetic interest. But the work’s strength ultimately lay in its details, which at once spoke to a richly involved, highly manual process of execution and to a compelling interplay between exuberance and precision.

Amongst broad, thick swathes of paint, which seemed the result of some substantial force visited upon the canvas, Pratt has introduced intricate fields of painted dots, lines, and faint suggestions of form. Often these were rendered with a delicate and light touch, as if done in a gesture of serious play; at other times they produced a formidable accumulation of matter on the canvas’ surface, lending it a sense of three-dimensionality. There was much to consider and to examine within each work—each presented clearly the attenuated narrative of its own creation—but the result was neither excess nor chaos. Instead one left the show satisfied, confident in the substantiality of what had just transpired and refreshed by the absence (rare on that Chinatown row) of gimmicks.

- Nico Machida

(*Images, from top to bottom: Katie Pratt, Katie Pratt, January 25 - February 29, 2008 Kontainer, Banjaxio!, 2007, Oil on canvas, 200 x 160 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Kontainer. Katie Pratt, Katie Pratt, January 25 - February 29, 2008; Kontainer, Firth of Venus, 2006, Oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Kontainer. Katie Pratt, Katie Pratt, January 25 - February 29, 2008; Kontainer, Sascheckewan, 2007, Oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Kontainer.)

Posted by Nico Machida on 1/27/08

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