Untangling Feeling: Kati Gegenheimer’s Passages
Installation view of Kati Gegenheimer, Passages, on view through November 16 at Kristen Lorello. Photo by Charles Benton, courtesy of Kristen Lorello.
Passages, Kati Gegenheimer's concise show of ten paintings now on view at Kristen Lorello through November 16, suggests that time is less a series of separate instances and more a pattern of experience. Across these small works (the largest here is a 24 x 54-inch triptych), Gegenheimer's mark-making and motifs converge to configure images as tactile as they are pictorial. In each, she has packed her composition full of gestures: variously succinct, structured, fluid, or intuitive. This dexterity of brushwork—each stroke precise and particular, connected yet dissimilar from each other—demonstrates the exhibition's overall conceit: that individual moments are linked through a lineage of feeling.
The relationship between time and emotion is a familiar concern for Gegenheimer. The Philadelphia-based painter has previously taken calendars and clocks for subjects and seasons for themes, her lyrical style evincing how time registers as standalone seconds and evocative moments of joy, desire, or wistfulness. Playful yet sincere hearts, bows, clouds, horseshoes, or birds often appear as emblematic of an earnest affectation. Articulated against and with pattern, decorative or linear, Gegenheimer's romanticism is self-aware but also guilelessly innocent, almost like a teenager's. That her style seems to reference this critical; the liminal period of coming of age hints at Gegenheimer's overarching interest in how the passage of time is inscribed on our bodies, consciousness, and identities.
Kati Gegenheimer, Untangling Knots (The End of Endings), 2024. Oil on linen. 24 x 26 inches. Photo by Charles Benton, courtesy of Kristen Lorello.
In Passages, Gegenheimer relies on abstraction and allusion which coalesce through her mark-making—the act of which can, of course, mark the passage of time. Identifiable motifs are proffered as the sum of many parts, each rendered gently impressionistic or fantastically colorful. Testing the limits of color and its relationship to tone and shape is a process through which Gegenheimer manifests the ineffable. For instance, in Untangling Knots (The End of Endings) (2024), a horizontal composition dominated by purple-hued stars seeping out of black underpainting, specks of yellow, blue, red, and white paint chain together in swirls and spirals, while larger swaths of these colors peek out in irregular shapes. The Pointillist-like approach affects a sort of night sky or cosmos, implying an infinity of time and space. Still, there's nothing immediately recognizable here in the forms, but the rhythm of color and shape unify and absorb the viewer's focus as their eye traces each brushstroke. With Gegenheimer completely filling the painting's surface with color and shape, there is no ending or beginning: with the work's title in mind, the angular shapes begin morphing into angular Möbius strips, formally suggesting the infiniteness of time.
Kati Gegenheimer, The Door Harp Players, 2024. Oil on panel, 28.5 x 25.5 inches. Photo by Charles Benton, courtesy of Kristen Lorello.
Likewise, text is a means for Gegenheimer to make references coyly—perhaps even flirtatiously. Titles of individual works (and the title of the show itself) hint at each other, as in Correspondence or Conversation Bench (2024), both enigmatically implying an exchange between two people. Coupling or duality is only expressed directly in The Door Harp Players (2024), a heart-shaped panel that depicts two birds flying toward the instrument's strings. The piano keys are untouched, unplayed, in the dual paintings Flower Songs (2024) and Shell Songs (2024), both of which have respective panes of flowers and shells where the top of the piano should be. The shell shapes in the latter are especially abstract, connected through strands of bead-like marks, just as in Untangling Knots, and a shrilly fluorescent coral dominates the composition. This same sharp red-orange is present in the likewise abstracted Reverberations (2024), which closes up on a cello's middle. At the painting's center are the instrument’s strings, which seem to be mid-pluck (or song?), the movement of sound indicated formally by the burst pattern of color and brushstroke in the center-left and literally in the work's title. Elsewhere, letters and language are distorted into painterly, abstract forms, Gegenheimer seemingly delineating them in a sinewy script as in Correspondence (2024) and Atlas of Feeling (2024). The latter is small, particularly compact, with the text taking up almost all of the painting—its message, depicted across a surface of undulating exacting or loose brushwork, proposing the myriad of human emotion is a map and space to be traveled.
Kati Gegenheimer, Atlas of Feeling, 2024. Oil on linen, 24 x 18 inches. Photo by Charles Benton, courtesy of Kristen Lorello.
“Passage” implies movement through space. It can also mean a snippet of information, most often a snippet of prose or a swath of painting. Still, it can also be understood as the experience of time, as in the “passing” of time. In Passages, Gegenheimer means all three, contending that our emotional, temporal, and experiential spaces are strung together through nodes of feeling.
Kati Gegenheimer: Passages is on view at Kristen Lorello through November 16, 2024.
