One Wall, One Work: Kate Shepherd

Krakow Witkin Gallery has exhibited Kate Shepherd’s work for over twenty-five years. In that time, Shepherd has explored color, form, light, shadow, and object-hood, among many other topics, in painting, sculpture, and installation. In Shepherd’s first solo show with the gallery in 2001, a centerpiece was a wall painting that challenged one’s assumptions of forms, reflections, and shadows. In her second show, the physical form of enamel-painted panels took on a stronger role, where image and object simultaneously conflated and supported legibility. In Shepherd’s 2018 exhibition, she showed printed paintings that re-created reflections of her studio on gloss enamel. After photographing these reflections, she screen-printed them back onto the panels. Once the paintings were shown in the gallery, the paint reflected their new environs.

Shepherd’s latest work continues to address the particular physical qualities of reflective enamel paint. She now sands down the foundation until it is velvety and then adds an image with the unadulterated paint. The matte surface emphasizes the highly-reflective, glossy shapes as well as the activity outside the painting that is now reflected in/on it. Visual “intrusions” help to deepen the artistic decisions because of the forever-changing encounters of happenstance reflections. Previous compositions can be detected in pentimenti lending a richness to the surface.

Shepherd uses the language of architectural space by defining glossy shapes that suggest the gravity of a fictitious environment. Quadrilateral forms (which the artist calls “surrogate paintings”) guide the viewer’s reading of the picture plane. The color used in this new painting is blue, a color that is both neutral and atmospheric. In an almost imperceptible way, the tones of blue shift throughout all the elements serving to give the impression of light and shadow. The painting’s abstraction allows an openness because the depicted space doesn’t make a totally obvious reference. Object, painting, reflection, and time become incredibly particular and yet stay open-ended.

Shepherd has exhibited at museums and galleries across the United States and Europe since 1994. Her most recent museum solo exhibitions include “Kate Shepherd: Lineaments,” Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, North Carolina, and “Intersections: Relation to and yet not (homage to Mondrian) by Kate Shepherd,” Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Shepherd’s work is featured in numerous museum collections including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; and Seattle Art Museum, Washington. The artist lives and works in New York City, where she was born in 1961.