NYAB Event - Kate McCrickard “Kid”

Kate McCrickard “Kid”

David Krut Projects

This event has ended.

David Krut Projects presents Kid, the first solo exhibition in New York of Paris-based artist Kate McCrickard. The exhibition comprises a selection of paintings, drawings and prints – some made in collaboration with Jillian Ross at David Krut Print Workshop in Johannesburg, and others hand-printed by the artist in her Paris studio. In this body of work, McCrickard has emulated the French convention of the late nineteenth century by mining her daily life for subject matter; much of the material is oriented around children and family – games, reading, dressing, feeding. Acknowledging the influence of tropes, methods and practices that have preceded her, McCrickard has created a body of work that is firmly rooted in a European pictorial tradition.

The formal links in Kid to French artists of the nineteenth century are very clear: full-to-bursting compositions, the result of doing away with perspective as an important consideration for composition; the use of broad sweeps of color that recall the woodcuts of Munch; the treatment of figures in interior scenes as opportunities to investigate form, color and line in the tradition of Vuillard. Drawing has provided a base for the production of this body of work – many compositions have been captured directly from life, and the proximity of the artist to her subject matter has allowed her to engage the odd, low viewpoints that come from a child’s perspective. While remaining faithful to figuration, McCrickard finds abstract shapes and satisfying combinations of line and color, creating images that fall somewhere between suggestions of form and movement and the mildly grotesque.

The engagement of different media reveals a push and pull within McCrickard’s work. In printmaking, the challenge of creating a lithographic mark – swifter and more economical, and therefore closer to drawing – through intaglio processes results in richly layered and complex matrices. McCrickard’s hand-printed monotypes are significant particularly in terms of their relation to Paul Gaugin’s trace monotype technique, which allowed access to a pleasing combination of different elements of the printmaking, painting and drawing media, even without access to a press. In February 2013, McCrickard worked with Michael Woolworth, a master printmaker in Paris on a series of acrylic monotypes, further extending the exchange of thoughts between people in collaboration, which is generative of new ideas.

The color palette of the works, sometimes certain clothing or haircuts, suggests a time gone by – perhaps hearkening back in the artist’s own imagination to images of her parents or grandparents as children. This link with images of the recent past and the continuity of historical precedents in McCrickard’s work has produced timeless images in an ancient idiom – the depiction of daily life, the assimilation of everyday experience into visual experience.

Kate McCrickard is a British artist and writer based in Paris, France. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1998 where she received her MA Honors Degree in Fine Art. Her work is included in the collections of The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh and The British Museum in London.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing
• Prints

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