ABOUT MY 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.

✨✨✨

FOR REFERENCE:

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

  • “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 Thomas Gibson

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kati Gegenheimer (b. 1984, Langhorne, PA) recently mounted solo exhibitions at North Orange, (Montclair, NJ) and Gross McCleaf, (Philadelphia, PA), as well as a two person exhibition at Kristen Lorello, (New York, NY). Group exhibitions featuring her work include The Woodmere 81st Annual at the Woodmere Museum, (Philadelphia, PA), Mars in Cancer at David Petersen Gallery, (Minneapolis, MN), Reveries at Peep Projects, (Philadelphia, PA), and Good Pictures curated by Austin Lee at Jeffrey Deitch, (New York, NY).

She received her BFA in Printmaking and Art History from Tyler School of Art in 2007 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2013. She has been a Pollock-Krasner Residency Recipient at Yaddo as well as an artist in residence at the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency.

Gegenheimer currently lives and works in the Brewerytown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

CV

Contact: katigeg (at) gmail dot com