Radiant Net

New Paintings by Katy Kirbach

June 23rd — August 25th, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: Sunday, June 23rd, from 3-6pm

RUSCHWOMAN
2100 S. Marshall Blvd., Suite 105
Chicago, IL 60623

Following the opening, gallery hours are available by appointment only.

Please contact thewaves@ruschwoman.blue to make arrangements to visit RUSCHWOMAN during the run of the exhibition.

All of the old male gods have been slain, their surfaces flayed to ribbons. This was liberating, but it has had consequences. Now whenever a rat scurries across silk, its sharp little feet catch on the smooth weave, shredding the surface into irregular holes and drossy clumps of silken fiber. When floorboards are walked across, one hears the sound of their creaking, ever so subtly rocking into and away from one another, restless in their current flat arrangements. There is a rise in people pushing doors that are meant to be pulled, in shoelaces needing to be retied, of corsets proving challenging to unlace fast enough with the amorous rush toward consummation. A painter paints and now cuts and reassembles and paints and cuts and reassembles and cuts and paints and cuts and cuts. Spiders assigned female at birth devour those assigned male ever since the old male gods’ downfall. More fallout: there are more sweaters that need mending. Lattice top pies are in higher demand than at any other point in this civilization’s food industry. More books need reshelving.

But this is the tipping point toward remembering what has been gained from the cosmic coup. More books need reshelving because more people are reading more books. It is no longer compulsory to accept the ground as it has been provided. There is beauty in the work and gratification in the exhaustion from the work. Each straying sunbeam, breath exhaled, shifting tint on a blushing cheek may be valued—not for trade or profit—but as an additional axis intersecting those meant to describe time and space: since the flaying of the old male gods, everything that conspires to produce me and you and us and a day and a painting and a way of looking and the capacity to long for something and the something that is desired are all organized and described as constitutive to love. There has up til now been a plane whose parameters have been coordinated according to time and space; since the spilling of the old male gods’ blood, we are newly coordinated according to love more than anything else, at the cessation of all else. It is because of love, festooned in ribbons, that baby spiders devour the spider who bore them. It is because of love that the blood stained earth and the trauma of birds who fly at the highest altitudes and history painters and you will be unable to forget or even find any distance from the ravaged gore of gods sliced into ribbons, dragging low and heavy, soaked in everything he (all them he’s) had been holding within himselves. The picture as it had been handed down from the heavens was doubted, its structure undone. And the consequence of that rebellion was that henceforth all rats, all floorboards, all painters, spiders, and pies—everything became weaver and everything became woven. An ontological paradox of parts of being being moved over and under other parts of being gave material form to a love that had previously only been photons.

Over under around and through. Throughout the past decade Katy Kirbach’s approach to painting has fractured the medium’s singular operation within the realm of appearances, a rationalist’s protest to the easy equation of seeing being believing. Instead, Kirbach has resorted to a stratagem exercised by artists across two or three generations before her who tempered their commitments to formalism and total abstraction with ties to feminism and a liberatory politics that resists status quo power relations: a shift of attention down into the superstructures where elided labors, means of production, and marginalized subject positions may be scrutinized. For Kirbach’s practice this has meant a magnification and reenactment of the foundational structures of painting for time immemorial: the cloth upon which most paintings we know, are taught, remember, and appreciate depend. It’s even telling the persistence with which this base layer of painting is referred to almost exclusively as “canvas,” to divorce it from the broader associations of feminized domestic labor with the material reality of cloth. And more than only gendered aspersions to the craft of cloth-making, there is the persistent culturally embedded relationship between weaving and punishment following on Ovid’s tale of Athena sentencing Arachne to a life as a spider.

Frequently, the painted cloths of Kirbach’s oeuvre have been subsequently cut into strips and woven, echoing the very structure of the material which she has colored, replete with experiments in sequencing, spacing, and ordering. The resultant shimmering fields of color are often defined as much by absence as presence—breathy webs and nets that open up to the walls behind them in atheistic glamour. Kirbach exchanges the ‘through’ of transport to a fantastical elsewhere for a ‘through’ that passes beyond the painted surface back to the wall hardly an inch beyond it. The porous perforated surfaces constructed from her open weaves function as partial veils hovering between the aura of a culturally imposed immanence around the nature of art not to mention the hallowed halls in which it is shown, and a frank revisitation of the appreciable modesty of a wall being nothing more than a wall, the wooden stretchers themselves observed, and the cut open edges of the canvas’ weave all conspiring toward a magic of the here and now rather than the longstanding ethos of painting as portal.

The image, such as it is, fragments in Kirbach’s process, and with it the attendant designs of depiction, illusion, rhetorical persuasive argument. Rather, she dissects the picture plane into an array of bits, flecks, and facets—the cartography of a disco ball or an insistence on a tangible analogue to the kinds of pixelation for which we are culturally conditioned through buffering streaming, jpeg degradation, and the grain of an ever watching surveillance capitalism. Harkening too toward Jack Whitten’s ‘tesserae,’ Alma Thomas’s rippling dashes, Agnes Martin’s grids, and perhaps most directly referenced, Anni Alber’s weaving diagrams, Kirbach trades in a dialect within the language of abstraction that parses phonemes into constellatory arrays—an attention toward minutiae and a commitment to the interdependencies of the unit and the larger ecosystem to which it belongs.

In Katy Kirbach’s newest works, subtle shifts in hue and tone across these facets are held aloft in the radiant nets of her open weaves. The warp and weft of the cloth from which the painting is constituted is imitated (also neatly dragged, deranged, and otherwise lovingly disrupted) in the all-over compositional structures of the canvas. There are several instances in which the canvas is constructed bit by bit from the mosaic-adjacent surfaces of painted points of overlap, and subsequently those canvases serve as units within a yet larger whole. Painting here is both reduced to a minimal set of tactics and exploded into endless permutations of complexity. At the scale of these marks and ideas, the patterns they evoke might be neurological, sociological, architectonic, or algorithmic—suspended between particle physics and the binarisms of widespread data collation.

Within these structural concerns a phenomenology of color is animated through glow, nuanced shifts, and a kind of physically rendered iridescence. The potential stoicness of the calculation or science of deduction are, throughout Kirbach’s practiced sensitivities, draped in the equivalent of portable sunsets, a theater of rose colored glasses, and annunciations of perceptual reverie. This web slinger’s structures and labors go quantum under the sway of color’s capacity for affect approaching romantic fantasy. These paintings are cunning in their construction, but it is their lingering effulgence that distinguishes them as masterful marvels.

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