Katherine Bowling: Moments of Grace at DC Moore Gallery

NEW YORK, NY.- DC Moore Gallery presents Katherine Bowling: Moments of Grace, the first presentation of the artist’s work at the gallery.

Katherine Bowling’s recent paintings focus on the subtle luminosity and evocative power of the everyday landscape. She captures ephemeral moments – rustling foliage, rippling water, shifting shadows, and flickering sunlight – while simultaneously communicating the enduring presence of our natural surroundings. Eschewing the dramatic and exotic, Bowling paints stands of trees, the sky, underbrush, fields, and remote stretches of road. Her work conveys serenity tinged with hints of mystery in the heavy orb of a full moon, low hanging fog, or tangled branches. Speaking about her interest in conveying mood and memory, Bowling reveals, “I realize that I am more interested in depicting a psychological space…fleeting images that you might see when you close your eyes right before you go to sleep. I choose landscape because it is a universal experience.”

Katherine Bowling, "Central Park", 2009. Oil on spackle on wood, 48 1/2 x 36 inches

Intimately familiar with her subject matter, Bowling paints the landscape surrounding her home in the Catskill Mountains. Referencing her preference for the immediate over the picturesque, she notes, “I can stay in one place and find endless subject matter to paint by taking the time to observe the immediate moment – the time of day, the light, the details.” She elaborates, “I’m not interested in painting the panoramic. It’s about the details you overlook on the path to the grand view.”

This longstanding commitment to subject matter is paralleled in Bowling’s relationship to her process and medium. She has evolved a unique method of working in which she applies oil paint to a ground created by layering spackle on wood panel. This surface treatment lends the work a dense, temporal quality that furthers the suggestion of atmosphere and introspection in her work. In the exhibition catalog, Molly O’Neill writes of Bowling’s process, “Her initial layers generally correspond with the color of the light, pink here, gold there, a neon orange, a still denim blue. Layering and sanding, layering and sanding create a luminous, back-lit affect and on this ground, Bowling brushes, rubs, gouges, scrubs and rolls paint, creating layers and layers of second thoughts and second chances.”

Katherine Bowling lives and works in Manhattan and upstate New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, OH; Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center, New York; and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Bowling’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; and Fisher Landau Center, Long Island City, NY. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.

A color catalog is available with an essay by Molly O’Neill.

Nathan Oliveira: Drawings 1960 – 2010, an exhibition of works on paper from the last four decades of the artist’s career, will also be on view April 22 to May 28, 2010.