ABOUT THE WORK

My paintings hold what floats, namely ‘place’ and ‘time.’ Time can be suspended, the to-do list repurposed, and the scroll of life can pause for the important parts to bubble back to the top like a kaleidoscopic calendar.  Existing simultaneously as landscape, portrait, and still life, they are first built off of a familiar structure like a wall calendar, a stacked diptych with an image at the top and a grid on the bottom, or a music staff of five lines running along the horizon. Then, they are interrupted or reified with colors and symbols that are signs and signifiers of place, time, mood, and sensation. The surfaces hold oil paint brush strokes that are both muscular and flourished in touch - emphatic and certain in their economy and intention. 

The point of painting now is to create something that cannot otherwise exist in this world. My paintings are not a replication of this reality, nor a depiction, but instead they are a handmade shorthand of potentials. For me, a flattened space offers truth as opposed to false illusion. The symbols and colors form a visual narrative of a life, a train of thought, free association poetry of the modern world with all of its beauty and problems. Time, temperature, weather, mood and touch all unite in the name of feeling like a crescendo in a love-song ballad. The paintings hold romance, sentimentality, and play the way a mirror holds a note in lipstick or a window holds a backward note in breath. 

My paintings are each an altar to a moment that is fleeting. My paintings are actively a sign, symbol, and record all at once.

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FOR REFERENCE

  • Passages at Kristen Lorello, New York, NY | October 12 - November 16, 2024. View the exhibition PDF and Press Release.

  • Gegenheimer featured on Yale Radio interviewed by Brainard Carey, November 8, 2024.

  • “The relationship between time and emotion is a familiar concern for Gegenheimer. The Philadelphia-based painter has previously taken calendars and clocks for subjects and seasons for themes, her lyrical style evincing how time registers as standalone seconds and evocative moments of joy, desire, or wistfulness.” Read More: Untangling Feeling: Kati Gegenheimer’s Passages (Leah Triplett, Impulse Magazine, October 29, 2024).

  • Solo Exhibition at North Orange, Montclair, NJ | December 5, 2022 - January 21, 2023. View the exhibition PDF.

  • “Gegenheimer’s buoyant canvases flip the script. They are pangs, bells, clarion and urgent. They speak to joy, practice antigravity, and slough toward a kind of animated pictography.” Read More: Reveries at Peep Projects: Wordless Symmetries (Todd Stong, Title Magazine, November 8, 2022).

  • “The mixture of duration and pleasure isn’t emanating from the painting, it’s lodged in its goop, through the maintenance of continued making of a wish (or making a painting) despite knowing better, in favor of feeling better.” Read More: Kati Gegenheimer, Pleasure/Desire/Playfulness (Zachary Rawe, Egged_on, November 6, 2022).

  • ”In her show Stars Align at Gross McCleaf, there are keys and clocks and swans and gears and flowers and light in these paintings, and more than anything, love. These symbols form a kind of Tarot. They remind me of being twelve and seeing The Craft and buying that classic deck at the head shop in the mall and thinking—knowing—that I was tapped into the cosmic energies of the universe. My friends and I would spend hushed, ecstatic Friday nights in candlelit bedrooms conjuring the unknowable out of thin air, foretelling entire lifetimes for each other like it was nothing, making sense of lives we were just beginning to live, together.” Read More: Time, and My Friends (Michael Marcelle, Title Magazine, July 10, 2021)

Photo credit: Mark Gibson

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kati Gegenheimer's paintings are devoted expressions of love, luck, and time and draw inspiration from art history, architecture, popular culture, and craft. Her works embrace the decorative and diaristic, each an altar to a moment that is fleeting. Reliant formally on color, tempo, and composition, each of her paintings are a sign, symbol, and record all at once.

Gegenheimer (b. 1984, Bucks County, PA) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA, where she is an Assistant Adjunct Professor at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She received a MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2013 and a BFA in Printmaking with a minor in Art History from the Tyler School of Art in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kristen Lorello, New York, NY, (2024), North Orange, Montclair, NJ, (2022) and Gross McLeaf, Philadelphia, PA, (2021).  Group and two-artist exhibitions include Kati Gegenheimer | Chenlu Hou, Kristen Lorello, New York, NY, (2023), Mars in Cancer, David Peterson Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, (2023), Reveries, Peep Projects, Philadelphia, PA, (2022), and Good Pictures, curated by Austin Lee, Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY, (2020).

Gegenheimer’s work has been featured in Create Magazine, Maake Magazine, and she has been interviewed on Yale Radio’s Praxis Interview Series with Brainard Carey as well as the I Like Your Work Podcast. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Impulse Magazine and Title Magazine. She is a recipient of a Joseph Robert Foundation Grant, Yaddo Artist Access Grant and a smART Ventures Grant from the Office of Arts and Culture in Seattle, WA, and has been granted artist residencies at The Edward F. Albee Foundation, The Goldey House Artist Residency, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and was a Pollock-Krasner Residency grant recipient at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. Gegenheimer is a member of the Berman Museum’s National Advisory Council as well as the Yale School of Art Alumni Advisory Council.

Her work has recently been acquired by the Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she will present her first museum exhibition, We’ve Only Just Begun, in the Morris Gallery in the Historic Landmark Building, curated by Leah Triplett. Gegenheimer is represented by Kristen Lorello, New York, NY.

CV

Gallery Contact:
Kristen Lorello, owner + director
23 East 73rd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10021
Tel. 212 287 4020
info@kristenlorello.com

For all other inquiries: katigeg (at) gmail dot com