NEW YORK, NY.- Kristen Lorello is presenting a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kati Gegenheimer. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in New York City. It follows her inclusion in a two-artist exhibition at the gallery in 2023 and includes ten new oil paintings that embrace the decorative and diaristic in painting. Replete with varied and tempoed brushmarks of textured color, Gegenheimer's paintings figure passing moments and emotional resonance through a variety of familiar structures. A full-color exhibition brochure with excerpts of text by the artist is available.
Gegenheimer's paintings are devoted expressions of love, luck, and time. They draw inspiration from art history, architecture, popular culture, and craft. The color palette of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the Pattern and Decoration and American Arts and Crafts movements, and the languages of artists such as Florine Stettheimer and Miriam Schapiro join popular symbols of design, architecture, and folk within the artist's vibrant compositions. A wooden door harp, upright bass, and 1974 Baldwin Fun Machine organ, for example, provide structure for a variety of repeated forms and embellishments such as the keys of a piano, scrolling musical staffs, as well as leaves, hearts, and stars spun into a pattern. In the painting 'Correspondence,' Gegenheimer transforms the canvas into a love letter, framing it with colorful repeated squares, an homage to the Moravian Tileworks of Bucks County, PA, where the artist spent her childhood.
Through these references, Gegenheimer harks back to a time before digital imagery, when the passing of time and correspondence itself seemed to occur at a slower pace. Born in the early 1980s, Gegenheimer is part of the 'xennial' micro-generation that remembers life pre-internet and learned how to grow up alongside it. Her paintings, grounded in her own personal history and adoration of material culture, bring experiences of the past to view in present time. For the artist, this sense of collapsed time allows for a pause and opens the space for alternative potentials. As she writes,
Slowing down is like a walk through a flea market, something I’ve done most Sundays that I’ve found myself at my childhood home in Bucks County, PA. Untangling the Knot (The End of Endings) is about slowness and ritual, gathering around a table at the flea market with desire, curiosity, hope and…patience. Like a tangle of necklaces that have been knotted ten times over, this painting is the single one lacking structure, with no traceable beginning or end. I see this as optimism - to untangle a knot of discarded necklaces at a flea market, with the hope of finding…something incredible…given a new life once again.
Kati Gegenheimer was born in Bucks County, PA, in 1984 and 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 and Art History from the Tyler School of Art in 2007. Her works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at 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, NJ, 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. She is the recipient of a Yaddo Artist Access Grant and a smART Ventures Grant, and has been granted artist residencies at The Goldey House Artist Residency, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and the Pollock-Krasner Residency at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY.
