Modern Art is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by the British painter Katy Moran. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with Modern Art, and her first in London for three years.
Katy Moran’s work is formed from sensation; from mediating a particular sensory experience through the conventions of painting. Her purpose is not to illustrate or replicate an experience on canvas, but to gather some sense of it, and to work relentlessly on a surface until the character of a private reference begins to reveal itself.
Her fluent and energetic compositions recall the dynamic actions of expressive painting, and do so on a personal scale. Incredibly tactile, and rich in technique, Moran’s paintings tempt on the fringes of figuration and abstraction. That said, Moran sees her work as distinctly figurative, and hints that at a certain viewing distance this switch in focus is almost perceptible, while in many cases the titles of her paintings add and allude further to their content. Private references to midcentury ornament and a library of pictorial resources dance on the edge of recognition, as Moran translates the mood of her influences through painterly technique into expressive and suggestive form.
For her exhibition at Modern Art, Katy Moran has produced a delicate and energetic suite of small canvases. In each painting, the characteristic richness of surface and oscillating pattern of image and material behaviour take on particular and individual moods.
As her practice matures, shapes and images that have been resources for picture-making become more directly integrated. Moran uses collage in the construction of her surfaces, variously concealing them with paint, allowing her resources to contribute to the suggestion of imagery. Many of these new works have been made by editing and re-stretching paintings made on originally much larger canvases, a technique that affords Moran a sense of freedom from the restrictions of predetermined composition and a canvas’ edges. Found supports, images, and frames give and take-on character as Moran works through sensing, feeling and recognising form in the experience of building a painting.
Katy Moran was born in Manchester in 1975, and lives and works in London. Moran graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in painting in 2005, followed by her first solo show at Modern Art’s former premises on Vyner Street in 2006. Recent museum shows include Contemporary Fine and Applied Arts: 1928 – 2009, Tate St Ives (2009), a solo survey show at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2008), and Strange Solution, Art Now, Tate Britain (2008). Moran has made solo exhibitions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2008), Galeria il Capricorno, Venice (2009), and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco (2009). In late 2009 Katy Moran will take part in the thematic exhibition Visible/Invisible at London’s Parasol Unit.