Showcase // Kate Metten

From the 22/02/2022

until the 01/03/2022

Canadian artist Kate Metten came to Germany to further connect her phenomenological  research in painting and ceramics to the Bauhaus school of Modernism. While at  GlogauAir, Metten is generating abstractions that reaffirm Bauhaus Modernism while  embodying contemporary ideas in neuroscience. As a neuro-divergent artist, she is  interested in perception as the starting place for artistic inquiry. This body of work  was sparked from a dialogue with neuroscientist Radoslaw Martin Cichy, professor  at Freie Universitat Berlin, discussing colour constancy, pattern recognition, retinal  illusions and object recognition. Her approach activates ready-made tubes of paint by  layering transparent pigments within a grid structure so the colour mixes in the brain,  rather than on the palette. She carefully plays with the indexical quality of both oil  paint and clay to retain the intuitive logic of the maker’s touch; articulating a material  language that demonstrates her dedication to craftsmanship. Metten’s ceramic  sculptures are wheel thrown and use a potter’s vocabulary to invert our understanding  of the vessel by creating objects that are at once familiar yet functionally ambiguous.  She further connects her ceramics to the theme of perception by glazing her pots  with Neodymium, a rare earth mineral used in cellphones that has colour changing  properties; pale blue in fluorescent light and lavender in natural light, shifting in hue  depending on time of day. This presentation of the still life and oil painting confronts  the viewer with the conditioning of their own subjectivity. 

 

Monastic Living, 2022 

Oil on Canvas 

66 cm x 66 cm 

 

Unmasking (Still Life), 2022 

Neodymium Glazed Ceramic 

Dimensions Variable 

 

As Mute as the Berlin Sky, 2022 

Oil on Canvas

40.5 cm x 40.5 cm

 

https://www.katemetten.com 

@kate_metten

 

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