Kathryn Stevens graduated with a BFA from Elam in 1999 and has been regularly exhibiting in Auckland and Christchurch. She has been selected as a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards, the Waikato Art Award, the Parkin Drawing prize, the BMW Art Award and the Clifton’s Art Award. Kathryn was also a featured artist in Warwick Brown’s book Seen This Century: 100 Contemporary New Zealand Artists.

 

In her painting practice Kathryn is inspired by architectural drawing and urban spaces. Her work explores the tension between the surface of a painting and the representation of three dimensional space. Kathryn is represented through Whitespace in Auckland.

 

Kathryn’s compositions capture a fragment of folded space, without revealing the whole; the fragment creates a unique interplay with the painted surface. We are invited to consider an underlying tension between spatial illusion and reality as these interact on a two-dimensional surface, unifying and blurring distinctions while showing us complexities of space, contradiction and possibility. Layers of gesso, acrylic and oil paint generate a material thickness that extends into the space beyond the work’s surface. Simultaneously, tonal variations work away from a sense of material depth through a depiction of suspended, illusory space. This switching ... is part of an ambiguity that occurs at the boundary between the physical space in which we encounter the work, and how we perceive of the qualities of illusory space. In essence, one cannot proceed without the other.  - Elisha Masemann for ‘switch’ 2018

 

To see Kathryn's work follow the link here: Kathryn Stevens