Katherine Bowling: Divide

Solo exhibition

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by New York based artist Katherine Bowling, on view from September 22 – October 30, 2004. Divide is the artist’s first one-person exhibition at the gallery and will be accompanied by a full color catalogue with text by art critic Lilly Wei. Bowling has exhibited widely in the last 15 years and her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY and The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY.

For her first New York gallery exhibition in over five years, Bowling will exhibit new medium-large paintings on spackled wood panels depicting country roads and rural landscapes. While these landscapes are seemingly about place and the poetics of landscape - most are based on photographs taken in upstate New York - they are also very much concerned with formal issues of painting and abstraction. Bowling’s simple and straightforward compositions belie their richly worked surfaces: foreground and background become land and sky, layered patches of pigment become dense foliage. Roads literally lead in and out of many of her recent pictures, as in a quartet of paintings which depict the four seasons: Petal, Snow, Leaf, and Shade (all works 2004). Lilly Wei writes: “For all their familiarity, these roads lead away from certainty into the unknown, into the contingent and provisional, winding from the past into the future, a two-way traversal that adds immeasurably to their meaning.”

Katherine Bowling was born in Washington D.C. and lives and works in New York. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.