Kathy Cantwell: around the bend

Exhibition Dates: january 5 – 30, 2021

Reception: Thursday, january 7, 4pm - 8pm

The Painting Center is pleased to announce Around the Bend, the recent work of Kathy Cantwell in the Main Gallery. Cantwell is an artist who can express herself in the incremental changes within in the formal problems she sets for herself. For a time, she worked with vertical stripes that became more rhythmic as her palette brightened. She then housed the stripes within angled lines that moved through a color field, while adhering to the straight and narrow. In 2018, Cantwell configured one line to bend into a loop in one painting and followed it with another in which an angled line suspended in a loop. From this simple bend would emerge a significant departure for this reductionist artist.

Working in encaustic, Cantwell has always savored the irregularities and imperfections created by the medium dragging across the surface. While the insistent linearity signals orderliness and confinement, she breaks with their authority by leaning into the gesture or action it requires, taking a perverse delight in the resulting contradiction of visual conformity and tactile sensuousness. It’s as if a system is employed almost to undercut or challenge it.

Those initial bends became curves that turn on themselves in the series Curves. Upon closer examination, the curves are not so much rounded as they are composed of shorter straight lines, which are the result of blocking out the resistant pigments. Yet comparatively speaking, the artist seems downright impulsive even if due to a deviation and not an expressive explosion. Taking this turn, Cantwell, in the series By Inference, pushed the counterplay between reason and randomness, constancy and caprice, with madhouse constructions that appear to be drawn with geometric and perspectival accuracy but defy logical reading.

Kathy Cantwell lives in Montclair, NJ. She received her BFA at C.W. Post College and did graduate work with Carolee Schneemann at NYU. In recent years, she has shown at the Herb & Milly Iris Gallery, South Orange NJ; the Ice Gallery, Monmouth University, Monmouth, NJ; Revelation Gallery, NYC; Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Rye Art Center, Rye, NY; Drawing Rooms, Jersey City, NJ. In addition to The Painting Center, she is affiliated with Adam Peck Gallery, Provincetown, MA, and the Imlay Gallery, Montclair, NJ. She has co-curated shows at The Painting Center with Molly Herman and Lisa Pressman.

For more information please visit: kathycantwell.com