Kathy Cantwell: Nightlines

Exhibition Dates: May 24, 2016 - June 18, 2016

Reception: Thursday, May 26, 6 - 8 pm

The Painting Center is thrilled to present Kathy Cantwell's solo exhibition Nightlines. Artist Kathy Cantwell knows her way around a stripe. In the paintings on display in her current show Nightlines, she takes a pattern associated with regularity and restriction and transforms it into of vehicle of indeterminacy and expansion. Working in encaustic, the painter shuns the straight edge in favor of jaggedness, variable density, and overlapping. As an art student, Cantwell was drawn to the work of Gene Davis, a color field painter known for his color-balancing act of verticals. Taking his minimalist cue, she collapses the space between form and color, using simplicity and singularity to explore chromatic relationships. Yet for Cantwell, it is about the process of laying down the color, and her stripes result from making a complete side-to-side gesture with resistance from her medium.

She is equally an expressionist in her palette, which hovers in twilight tonalities. Even when a brighter shade is introduced, it is subdued by the wax medium and by the surrounding embrace of darkness. Allowing for associations and metaphor, Cantwell admires the work of Sean Scully, and she seeks to similarly elicit humanistic content from a universally recognized motif. With encaustic, she takes advantage of its having passed from one state to another, which is an almost fleshy embodiment of crossing the line or of knowing no boundaries.

After working in the music industry in New York City, Kathy Cantwell moved to New Jersey, where she currently lives with her wife and two children. In 2015, she had a solo exhibition Landforms at Gallery 103 in Maplewood, NJ. She has been shown in such group exhibits as: “Square Foot” Project Gallery, Miami Art Basel, Miami, FL, Arte Internazionale in Matera, Italy, One + One, A Gallery, Provincetown, MA, Viewpoints 2015, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Arts, Baruch College’s Mishkin Gallery, Montclair State University’s George Segal Gallery, the Monmouth Museum, the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, NY and numerous others. An illustrated catalog with artist statements accompanies the exhibition.

For more information on the artist, please visit www.kathycantwell.com.

View Catalogue: Cantwell Catalogue.pdf