In conjunction with Matthew Barney, Carolee Schneemann, Kazuo Shiraga, Min Tanaka at Fergus McCaffrey New York, we are delighted to present new work by Katy Martin on the second floor of our New York gallery, Tuesday, March 15 through Saturday, April 2. A performance by Martin will be held on Wednesday, March 30, 6 – 8pm, at the gallery.
Katy Martin’s commitment to the embrace and employ of her body is an act of defiance akin to Carolee Schneemann’s feminist critiques of action painting; Schneemann was an artist Martin knew personally and certainly saw perform—?tense events about which Martin has remarked, “Few people talk about the sound of Carolee’s performance, the friction that slapping of movement could have on the people in the room.” This figure onto ground act mirrors Martin’s own action—smearing her freshly painted body onto paper or canvas, sometimes publicly, often privately; then photographing and printing the residual impressions.
Martin addresses the ramification of painting’s act—?specifically abstract expressions conducted through the dimension of time. The pushing and pulling of painted forms manifests a sense of ephemerality in a gestural abstraction rooted in both east and west postwar conventions. Every moment of movement leaves a mark on the surface where Martin has orchestrated a phantasmagory of strokes hovering in visual and physical space.
