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KontainerGallery is pleased to present new work from the British artist KatiePratt. Based in London, Pratt has shown extensively throughout the UK and Europe, winning prestigious Jerwood Painting Prize in 2001.
Katie Pratt’s abstract paintings appear at a distance as a violent splash of paint. The surface, however, reveals detailed, tiny marks and dashes that elaborate upon the initial gesture. Each painting begins by throwing or pouring paint at the canvas, initiating a chain of reactions and discovery through the making-process.
In these works, Pratt incorporates the physical qualities of the material: it drips, congeals, coagulates, wrinkles, tears, curls and buckles over and on top of itself. Often there is a curious fringe hanging from the surface as the paint takes on a life of its own, flouting the confines of the brushstroke. The structural possibilities and physical characteristics of oil paint are pushed to the limit, sometimes reaching the point where its consistency and weight give in to gravity.
Treating the first splash of paint as if it were a found object is a way of getting started for Pratt. This presents her with a series of problems to solve that are both the course of the painting and the subject matter. As she works, Pratt – to an almost obsessive degree – highlights the visual rhythms, themes and repetitions that she finds. Each of the marks, flaws and imperfections that were at first barely perceptible are retracted and underlined with tiny strokes and dashes that cover the entire surface of the canvas. Like cartography, the paintings are a slow and careful charting of what is already there, of what already resides within the found splash. The titles of Pratt’s work suggest a location, hinting at an unseen place and providing a clue as to what painting might be.
This is Katie Pratt’s second solo show at Kontainer. Her work has been recently featured in “Landscape Confection” curated by Hellen Molesworth for Wexner Center for the Arts (traveled to MOCA Huston and Orange County Museum of Contemporary Art) and at John Hansard Gallery in a survey of three generations of British abstract painters with Patrick Heron and Jonathan Lasker.
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