Kathryn Lynch | Here Comes the Sun and Other Situations

JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY is pleased to present Here Comes the Sun and Other Situations, an exhibition of paintings by artist Kathryn Lynch, on view August 3rd through September 17th, 2023. An artist reception will be held at the gallery Thursday, August 3rd from 5 - 8pm. All are invited to attend. Lynch will be in attendance.

With this solo exhibition, her sixth with Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Lynch has focused her unsparing eye on the sun and the road, the subjects which define her time spent in Puglia, Italy last year. Lynch reflected, “It was the sun and the road, and just how free it felt. It was really rugged.” This body of work was largely inspired by Puglia but painted back in her studio in Catskill, New York, while other works in the exhibition were created from her time spent at the Truro Center for the Arts at Edgewood FarmResidency in Truro, Massachusetts, embodies Lynch’s longtime occupation and “crowning achievement as a painter: capturing the liminal spaces that define the essence of a given place,” as written by painter-critic Patrick Neal.

Though the places and elements that inspire Lynch vary from year to year and place to place, her method and her undertaking have remained the same. “I am painting the poetry of place rather than the place,” Lynch said. “It is a boat anywhere; it is a sky for everyone. It is nowhere and everywhere.” Her visual poems begin with moments wrapped in memory. Painterly and patient, Lynch lets her unconscious unpack what it has seen – prosaic subject matter that, through excavation and simplification, emerge as transcendent testaments to essentialism and the universality of human experience in nature. For Lynch, these pursuits are always autobiographical. “I think roads are very symbolic to me just in terms of feeling like I’m on an open road when I’m in my studio. Painting is kind of like a road to somewhere, but you don’t know where you’re going…. I’m interested in how light falls, the shapes that are made in nature, and how through paint it transforms itself into mood and feeling… They’re very simplistic, so they are not really about that particular road; they’re about everything a road conjures, everything it symbolizes.”

Landscapes are rendered timeless, parsed into near symbols: a road is represented by an intrepid cascade of ochre red, cars emerge as suggestive lines and blots of safety-orange, the sun is emphatically reduced to a vermillion orb. In paint handling, Lynch is sparing, working with confident brushstrokes in thinly veiled washes thrown open by the climactic flash of a brilliant tangerine sun. In many of these works, which are marked by a nebulous haze that engulfs the subject matter, the sun is not only the principal subject, but also the primary actor. “When the sun is really big, it actually makes you squint, and it creates a white haze… the sun itself has sort of created that haze… You can’t really look at anything so you’re just peeking.” Lynch uses these snapshots of memory and feeling to create dream-like and distinctly atmospheric works that not only capture the drama of different hours of the day and effects of light and time on a place, but also the experience of being present in those times, lights and places, of being within and subject to nature.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Kathryn Lynch received her undergraduate degree from William Smith College in Geneva, NY, and an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. She was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist Fellow in Painting in 2018. She has been invited to Skowhegan, Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center. Since earning her MFA, Lynch has held solo exhibitions and participated in well over thirty group shows both and internationally. Her work is in the permanent collections of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA and Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, as well as many corporate collections, including Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and the Millennium Art Collection in the Ritz Carlton, Battery Park, in NYC. The artist lives in Catskill, NY, and works in a curated artist campus called Foreland.