Private View: 24 November 6.30-9.00 PM
We're pleased to announce the opening of Kate Newby's solo exhibition So close,come on with an accompanying text by Alex Bacon.
So close,come on showcases a new series of site-responsive works that explore ideas around excavation and replacement, revealing Newby’s ongoing commitment to underline the limits and nature of sculpture. As is the case with much of the artist’s practice, the works on display demand particular attention, entering a complex dialogue with the architecture that hosts them. Newby’s material vocabulary – clay, broken glass she collects from sidewalks, bronze and rope – reveal her affinity for rediscovering and repurposing everyday objects in order to draw attention to the small, radically slight elements that often go unseen. Varying in scale, her material-driven artworks disclose an intimate conversation between maker and environment, drawing directly from their situational contexts in different cities, specific natural environments, and the interrelationships between.
For this exhibition, gleaming yellow glass panes produced in collaboration with Atelier Loire in Chartes using the process of jaune d'argent – a technique with origins in the 14th century – will replace the gallery windows. Other works on show include a large-scale handmade ceramic mural produced at Royce Wood Studio in Derbyshire, as well as a series of etchings revealing intricate motifs left behind by birds, cows, raccoons and the weather made over the course of several months at the artist’s home in Floresville, Texas. The synergetic nature of all the works on show – which have been produced in collaboration with either local artisans or the natural environment – always convey a strong sense of their direct, lived circumstance. Varying in scale, Newby’s ecologically-minded artworks are dependent on their chosen site and its individual particularities, encouraging the viewer to consider sculpture’s connection and relationship to the natural world.
Kate Newby (b. 1979, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, lives and works in Floresville, Texas) has exhibited widely and internationally. She received her Doctorate of Fine Art in 2015 from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. Recent solo exhibitions include: We are such stuff, Laurel Gitlen, New York (2022); COLD WATER, Fine Arts, Sydney (2021); Nothing in my life feels big enough, Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019); Wild was the night, Institut d'Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne (2019); A puzzling light and moving, lumber room, Portland, OR (2019); I can't nail the days down, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2018); and All the stuff you already know, The Sunday Painter, London (2018). She has been included in group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2019); 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg (2018); and SculptureCenter, NY (2017), among others. In 2012, she won the Walters Prize, New Zealand’s largest contemporary art prize, and in 2019 Newby was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. Newby was recently awarded the 13th edition of the Ettore e Ines Fico Prize at Artissima 2022. Kate has undertaken residencies at The Chinati Foundation (2017), Artpace (2017), Fogo Island (2013), and the International Studio & Curatorial Program ISCP (2012).
