Olympia is pleased to present Above and Below, a first-time exhibition of works on panel by the artist Kathleen Goncharov.
The exhibition will be on view from Sept. 15th through Oct. 22nd at Olympia art gallery in New York, located at 41 Orchard (in the Lower East Side, on Orchard between Hester and Grand).
MEET THE ARTIST: The opening reception is Thursday, September 15th from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. (the opening reception free and open to the public).
For decades, Goncharov alternated between putting on major institutional exhibitions and working in relative solitude in her studio.
Currently serving as senior curator at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Goncharov has practiced as a curator for forty years.
Yet through that time, she introspectively cultivated her own visual language.
Pink Landscape (2022) by Kathleen Goncharov. Colored pencil on panel.
Goncharov fell in love with Late Gothic and Early Renaissance painting during trips to Italy beginning in the mid-80s. She has returned regularly since as both artist and curator, most notably as U.S. Commissioner to the Venice Biennale.
Rather than affiliating with any recent visual tendency, Goncharov points to artists such as Giotto, Duccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesco, Masaccio, and especially the eccentric forms and colors of the Sienese painters such as Giovanni di Paolo, Sassetta, Master of the Osservanza, Sano di Pietro, and others – who approached religious subjectivity in their own distinctive fashion – as her central inspirations.
Goncharov abstracts their meditative forms to bring their oeuvre into an unknown terrain.
Sky View (2021) by Kathleen Goncharov. Colored pencil on panel.
Materially, she encapsulates the delicacy of egg tempera and gold leaf through colored pencil, which also preserves marks and requires slow layering to create rich color.
Goncharov’s self-developed imagery and muted palette give shape to a feeling of reverence, similar to that captured by Morandi in his secular still lives.
Siena Landscape (2012) by Kathleen Goncharov. Colored pencil and acrylic on panel.
Recurring abstract forms are re-imagined in each painting, remaining attuned to earthy color fields reminiscent of when pigment had to be extracted from soil.
The images evoke the movement of silk, rippling organs, or the undulating hills of the Tuscan landscape. Though enigmatic, they are expansive.
The pictures can be read both as environments and ruminations on enveloping touch.
Though first prompted by those warm, carefully drawn images of the Early Renaissance, Goncharov’s work reveals her private obsessions.
Separated from any epic, religious history, and moral allegory, her subject becomes the seductive atmosphere and color that only whispers in those historic paintings.
