C ATHERINE KURTZ P
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Drawing and painting find me at my most alive. Observing and recording both my subject and my own responses to that subject is the most vital and positive act. It is being in love with my chosen subject, choosing to rigorously attend to its every detail, and demand the same of the audience of my work. In choosing an object to paint I present it to the audience for their attention, I ask them to consider it, not to pass it by. I intend that my paintings are an antidote to the dulled half-observation we all fall into, an antidote for myself, during the act of painting and drawing, an antidote for the viewer, if I succeed in compelling them to observe. While the act of painting is joy, the choice of subject has me confronting my demons. I choose to depict isolated or juxtaposed objects that allow me to explore various preoccupying themes. These are always acutely personal, such as the struggle I have had to live with the pressure of expectations I have felt as a woman in today’s society. Or exploring ideas around mortality and the fragility of life. The prematurely dead forms of butterflies and birds force me to confront the brutality of loss, even while I observe their great beauty and charm. There is such transience in this beauty; it is part of their vitality, their life. This beauty in death, before decay has set in, is a very tender and mysterious moment. A moment that holds life and death, presence and absence, love and loss. In showing my personal response I hope to engender a like response to the subject in my audience. Above all, these paintings are an expression of my own, and our universal, vulnerability and mortal fragility. Catherine Kurtz 2020
P I N N E D
I have always found specimen insects creepy, and felt uneasy about their suspended beauty. However when I came across some butterflies in an antique shop in France I suddenly saw a connection to an important memory of mine. I have been carrying around fragments of the TS Eliot poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock since my teens. My memory specifically involves this passage: ‘And I have known the eyes already, known them all The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?’ The poem overall deals with mortality, the passing of our days, the experience of that passing. The image here is of man pinned, like an insect specimen, and it spoke to me. I felt that it spoke of societal and mortal limits, of people’s categorization and belittling of one another. It spoke of other people’s reductive expectations. In confronting the specimen butterflies I felt the poem anew, and saw also a new link. The poem is about a man, whose life is dissected within it. But as a woman I am aware of an extra reason that women in particular are limited and categorized – their looks. The butterfly is pinned down, killed, for its beauty. It is celebrated for its vivid looks, even while its flight is curtailed, its vitality cut off, controlled, owned by the collector. So the butterflies spoke to me both of the poem, which addresses mortality, but also of the plight of women, and myself as a woman. I chose to paint them in order to contemplate this, and to allow me to present the butterflies to the viewer through my own interpretation. The title, Pinned, is a simplification of these thoughts. It means the physical act of restricting, impaling, as well as a less literal reductive pinning down.
Pinned I 2016 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned VIII 2020 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned II 2016 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned V 2017 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned VII 2020 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned XI 2020 oil on board 34cm x 26cm
Pinned III 2016 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned IV 2017 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned IX 2020 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned VI 2016 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Pinned X 2020 oil on board 34cm x 26cm
M E M E N T O
M O R I
I hope to explore the line between life and death. It is absolute, a chasm, the greatest divide we must all cross, and yet as fine as a silk thread. It has been my intention to depict those fragile moments that somehow contain both. The painting that has most directly inspired my painting of birds is The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius. I saw this painting shortly after leaving art school, at a point when no one I knew had seen or heard of it. I came across it accidentally while visiting The Hague to look at a Vermeer exhibition. The exhibition was stunning, and Vermeer’s clarity and economy will always stay with me. But The Goldfinch, sitting outside the exhibition, is the picture I grew to hold most dear. However it was not until many years later that I first painted a bird, the first in this series, a juvenile goldfinch that I found dead during a particularly sad moment in my own life. I was compelled to paint it, and it was not until I had finished that painting that I thought of the connection. What moved me in Fabritius’ painting is the quality of light and line, but also the image of that delicate bird with its almost imperceptible chain keeping it from flight. In my own work the birds’ flight is arrested by death. Sadly, I have been able to paint their sweet beauty, and record their lifelessness. My paintings ought not to exist, they ought to be flying above us. We are used to seeing objects, even dead birds and animals, placed in still life arrangements on a table. But in stringing an object up, or separating it from the group, the object is seen with even greater clarity, the attention of the viewer is irresistibly drawn. In placing a bird, a dead mouse, alone, I hope to celebrate each life. But I know that I have also emphasized their vulnerability.
Memento Mori VII 2017 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Memento Mori II 2014 oil on board 17cm x 21.5cm
Memento Mori IV 2017 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Memento Mori III 2015 oil on board 17cm x 21.5cm
Memento Mori XII 2019 oil on board 17cm x 21.5cm
Memento Mori XI 2019 oil on board 17cm x 21.5cm
Memento Mori I 2014 oil on board 17cm x 21.5cm
Memento Mori V 2017 oil on board 34cm x 26cm
Memento Mori XIII 2018 oil on board 26cm x 34cm
Memento Mori VIII 2017 oil on board 17cm x 21.5cm
Memento Mori VI 2017 oil on board 26cm x 34cm
Memento Mori X 2018 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Memento Mori IX 2017 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Memento Mori XIV 2019 oil on board 21.5 x 17 cm
Memento Mori XV 2020 oil on board 52cm x 40cm
T O R N
These paintings hope to explore something of the reductive and skewed attitudes that colour female experience. I wanted to immerse in something seen as dominantly in the feminine domain and subvert it. The world of the domestic, and that of personal appearance, are areas where women are supposed to excel, are supposed to show great interest. They are also routinely belittled as trivial, superficial. When I think of homemaking, or fashion and beauty, I think of samples. Makeup colour samples, paint samples, fabric swatches are things with which a woman is meant to be concerned, must create beauty, must be beautiful, must get it right. I have taken fabric samples, each one potentially depicting a choice, a corner of the domestic in which I, as a woman, am meant to excel. Sheer and lacy, lingerie, floral cotton, a pretty kitchen curtain, dotty jersey, a child’s jumpsuit, supple leather, a sexy skirt. Each piece of fabric is a choice, a possibility, a persona, an ideal woman, pressure, potential failure. In tearing each strip of fabric, hanging it torn from a jagged metal nail, there is some thought about the reality of imperfection, and about the brutality of the pretty and feminine sample book we are meant to inhabit.
Torn I 2012 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn II 2013 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn XIII 2016 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn IX 2015 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn X 2015 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn VIII 2015 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn VII 2015 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn XII 2016 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn V 2014 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn XI 2016 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn IV 2014 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn VI 2014 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn III 2013 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Torn XIV 2016 oil on board 21.5cm x 17cm
Solo Exhibitions 1995 2000 2001 2003 2006 2009 2014 2020
The House, Romilly Street, London Two person show Recent Paintings, Celia Johhnson Theatre Gallery, London The Redfern Gallery, London Pants, The Redfern Gallery, London In My Shoes, The Redfern Gallery, London Food | Sex | Fashion, The Redfern Gallery, London The Garden of England Drawings, The West House, Kent Pinned, The Redfern Gallery, London
Group Exhibitions 1992 1993 1997 1998 1999 2000 2011 2011 2011 2012 2013
Summer Exhibition, The Redfern Gallery, London Summer Exhibition, The Redfern Gallery, London The Piccadilly Gallery, Cork Street, London The Albermarle Gallery, Albermarle Street, London Art for Kinoe, 74 St James Street, London Small Objects of Desire, Christmas Exhibition, East West Gallery, Blenheim Crescent, London Objects Beds, Bowls, Boots and Others, Collyer-Bristow Gallery, Bedford Row, London Christmas Exhibition, East West Gallery, Blenheim Crescent, London Christmas Exhibition, East West Gallery, Blenheim Crescent, London Christmas Exhibition, East West Gallery, Blenheim Crescent, London Show for the Kettle’s Yard Fund, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Small is Beautiful, Flowers East, London, IFPDA, New York, Print Fair IFPDA, New York, Print Fair The Redfern at 90: An Anniversary Exhibition, The Redfern Gallery, London
All images Š Catherine Kurtz courtesy of The Redfern Gallery
20 Cork Street, London, W1S 3HL tel +44 (0)207 734 1732 art@redfern-gallery.com redfern-gallery.com