Katy Moran’s abstract paintings conjure atmospheres – at times suggestive of landscape, still life, or figuration – through her exploration of form, gesture, colour and surface. While the legacy of Expressionism is evident in her painterly language, Moran’s work is firmly grounded in the materiality of painting as object. Her work has methodically concentrated on what kinds of alchemy can be offered up in the pre-existing surface of the readymade - found paintings, frames, or collage - as it combines with her own mark-making. More often than not, these readymades are framed paintings, which Moran has reworked through her own vocabulary of gestural improvisations – smears, drips, or careful brushstrokes, resisting any form of figuration that may have pre-existed on these supports. As such, Moran’s works constitute a refusal of the process of recognition: kitsch pastoral scenes become abstract vistas, their title plaques coyly redacted. Moran’s liquid abstractions use painting itself as a fluid and ever metamorphosing medium, where desire and unconscious processes can reign free. “I follow whatever idea reveals itself, knowing I will abandon it at any stage if something better comes along,” she has stated. This palimpsestic approach is rendered with brushstrokes that overlap themselves and evolve continually, traversing a vast terrain of moods in their radiant and searching vocabulary of forms, textures and colours.

Katy Moran was born in Manchester in 1975, and lives and works in Hertfordshire. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater, New York (2023); Modern Art, London (2022); Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London (2015); the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2013); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2010); Tate St Ives (2009); and the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2008). She has shown in recent group exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2018); Aspen Art Museum (2015); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013); and SFMOMA, San Francisco (2012). Moran’s paintings are held by the Pinault Collection, Paris/Venice; the Rubell Museum, Miami; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; SFMOMA, San Francisco; and Tate, London.