CITY OF STATUES

By Stephanie Cristello

“They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets. They stood on the top of the highest towers, lay down on stone tombs, sat on horseback, kneeled, prayed, fought animals and wars, danced, drank wine and read books made of stone…Some wore costumes of other periods, and some no clothes at all.”1

—Anaïs Nin

In the opening chapter of Anaïs Nin’s Collages, a woman remembers how she observed the statues of the city as a child—their gaze, their posture, their frozen gestures—as witnesses to the actions that have and continue to unfold around her. Sometimes their a itudes change. The figures come to mean something different as contemporary life alters how they are perceived. These silent spectators are described as lovers, enemies, and confidantes amid the public squares, upon the façades of buildings, and within parks visible from her bedroom window. At night, away from the light of the sun that petrifies them, they come alive in her dreams.

“Their silence by day taught her to read their frozen lips as one reads the messages of deaf mutes.”2

The woman is a painter. She believes the statues hold secrets, that there is another world in which they are animate. When separated from our gaze, they feel and act like us, touched by nature and industry.

“On rainy days their granite eye sockets shed tears mixed with soot.”3

1. Anaïs Nin, Collages (Athens: Swallow Press, 1964), 1.

2. Nin, Collages, 1.

3. Ibid.

The newest body of work by Katy Cowan indicates a similar sensitivity toward the figurative sculptures that populate many European cities, in this case Berlin, alongside other inert passages of stone (barriers, buildings) that look onto contemporary daily life. She watches them as strangers on the street, remarking how they relate to one another. “Through the crevices of bent arms, arched backs, proud and humble chins, repose, strength, love, fear, disinterest, I watch the seasons change, the clouds move through them, people of Berlin coming and going—resting, reposing, drinking, laughing, and the city humming by. They remain,” writes Cowan. “I feel their bodies, their emotions, their changes in a itude, their lives. Sometimes they are so fluid, and sometimes so cold.”4

“She was convinced that people did not die, they became statues.”5

For Cowan, two specific references are disclosed within the collection of works that constitute her exhibition gods on a bridge—remnants of the Berlin Wall that still stand as a token of the former division between East and West, and a bridge in Schöneberg’s Rudolph-Wilde-Park whose Neoclassical statuary depicts the mythological figures of Triton and Nymph in various poses and configurations across its parapets. One marks a path open to travel, punctuated by tableaux of a romantic couple that unfolds in scenes as one walks across; the other a symbolic remainder of the hinderance of movement, a relic of the obstruction now covered with layer upon layer of graffiti. Neither is static, each bears the marks of Berlin’s war-torn history still visible in the architecture in distinctive formal ways. Statues marred by bombs, concrete pockmarked by shards of shrapnel and bullets. Cowan replicates these indications of the built environment’s exposure to violence within the structural elements of her wallbased reliefs—punctures that wound any segments of smooth surface.

Assembled from shapes of jagged cardboard used for architectural modeling, tape, and rope, that burn away a er being exposed to the molten elements during the forging process, Cowan’s cast aluminum supports are painted in swathes of monochromatic grayscale, reminiscent of concrete, whose ground is interrupted by brazen markings. Across the ebullient compositions, these highly saturated and neon hues jolt across the surface in scrawls and geometric pa erns like the tags that deface monuments across Berlin. Yet from this pale e, at once Fauvist and vibrantly urban, whispers of silhoue es arise from the impasto surfaces—partial portraits, reclining bodies, gestalt apparitions. In whisper to night itself; as far, 2019

(2023), a seated figure with folded limbs is hinted through undulating lines. Neither man nor woman, almost childlike in its androgyny, the being’s arms envelop the midline of the body, as if hugging itself. A thin thread, which snakes from the le side of the composition, suddenly halts in the center to bisect the picture plane. The source of light, as in many of Cowan’s compositions, is frontal and timeless. Shadows are eliminated in favor of colors that abut against each other to delineate form. From these Kandinsky-like contours, the pointillist application of paint amid the metal surface recalls the same striking movement that statues have been subject to by the artist’s hand.

While the initial subject of Triton and Nymph constitutes the basis of Cowan’s studies, of close reflection upon two statues as if they were a modern couple caught in an affair, only one of the compositions illustrates the presence of two bodies. The diptych when stone entwines (2023) pictures highly stylized versions of the sea Gods—part human, part fish— captured in portrait. Though the bodies of the statues dissolve into cacophonous bands of aquamarine, crimson, violet, green, and gold, the placement of the figure’s heads suggests their eyes remain locked into one another’s. References to how water behaves, such as how ripples trace the actions that occur upon a pond as leaves falls or swans swim across, is evident in Cowan’s manipulation of pigment. As if picturing how Nin’s world comes alive in the mirrorlike surface instead of under the cover of night.

The hybrid character of the figures is also present in the artist’s a itude toward the medium of painting—as works on paper that are also sculpture, or the crisis of representation embedded in the very nature of collage. Cowan’s a ention across these spheres amounts to a sum of comparisons—between history and the present, movement and inertia, our bodies and those of others. Here, collapsed in a series of interwoven vigne es observed by Cowan’s gaze, we witness fragments of the past inflected by the possibilities of reading sentiment into unconscious beings. A process of imbuing sentience onto not only painting, but also a city steeped in a record of wounds as visible through its statues.

Oil

29 x 159 x 3 inches

73.7 x 403.9 x 7.6 cm marks cover, layers layer, 2021

Oil

48 x 12 x 2 inches

121.9 x 30.5 x 5.1 cm fragment of rest, 2023

Oil and enamel paint, graphite on cast aluminum/painted wood

30 x 20 x 2 1⁄2 inches

76.2 x 50.8. x 6.4 cm if only, if yet, 2023

Oil and enamel paint, graphite on cast aluminum/painted wood

31 1⁄2 x 30 x 2 1⁄2 inches

80 x 76.2 x 6.4 cm something intangible and else, 2023

40 x 38 x 2 1⁄2 inches

101.6 x 96.5 x 6.4 cm tangled, eternal motion, 2023

45 x 25 x 2 1⁄2 inches

114.3 x 63.5 x 6.4 cm

through bends and reaches, 2023

28 x 30 x 2 1⁄2 inches

71.1 x 76.2 x 6.4 cm when stone entwines, 2023

Oil and enamel paint, graphite on cast aluminum/painted wood

Le panel: 40 x 31 x 2 1⁄2 inches

101.6 x 78.7 x 6.4 cm

Right panel: 40 x 31 x 2 1⁄2 inches

101.6 x 78.7 x 6.4 cm whisper to night, 2023

29 x 24 x 2 1⁄2 inches

73.7 x 61 x 6.3 cm