Katherine Spindler: Interlude

Barnard is pleased to announce the introduction of Interludes, a series of exhibitions to be presented in the gallery’s second space adjacent to the main gallery. Smaller in scale and scope this room allows for a more personal and intimate engagement with works. As the title implies, proposed projects by selected artists will explore ‘intervening works’ in their practice, or the previously ‘unheard conversations’ between paintings. Essentially Interludes considers a painter’s progress and production between more public projects. These somewhat less formal and perhaps more personal presentations are intended to facilitate a better understanding of and appreciation for an artist’s process and practice.

It seems appropriate that the first artist to be featured on Interludes is Katherine Spindler whose paintings explore intermediary states and emotions. Attempting to ‘hold time’ her painterly compositions present, as it were, the space between moments, the interstice of time and place. A defining characteristic of Spindler’s oeuvre is the unlikely marriage of movement and stillness, of tumult and quietude that elicits a similar mix of emotion in the viewer. In examining her paintings one has the sense that things are moving just beneath and beyond the surface, too vast to fully perceive or understand. With a quiet immensity and arresting gravitas, her work sees light and shadow flicker and evade, swirl in eddies, swell and recede. The surface of the canvas, like water, is unstable, constantly shifting and undulating while maintaining a meditative stillness that both captivates and mystifies. Often blurring, veiling, or erasing the images she works with, Spindler’s intention is to evoke rather than explicate, to suggest more than to prescribe.