Kate Newby, artist, debuts in New York
New York-based Aucklander Kate Newby debuts at the Laurel Gitlen Gallery in the Lower East Side with a show ‘I memorized it I loved it so much’, with a laudatory review in The New York Times by Roberta Smith, commenting that “Ms. Newby’s work has a wonderful sense of freedom and material inventiveness and an idiosyncratic beauty.”
An artist known for her wry humor and for poetic and installations that respond to the conditions of everyday life, Kate Newby graduated with a MFA from Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland University in 2007. The New York Times reports that her work in ‘I memorized it I loved it so much’ “weaves in and out of the gallery’s larger space with sculptures in glazed ceramics, glass and metal. There are forays into delicate intervention: A spiky object — part cactus, part mollusk shell — in glazed porcelain rests on the air-conditioner cover outside the gallery’s side window; above it, two slabs of glazed stoneware curl over a fire escape like pancakes hung out to dry.
“Inside, a low platform with a large concrete mound — both of them painted highway-stripe yellow — spans one end of the space. Atop the platform are several tiny, amulet-like objects and groups of small things — four twigs in glazed brass and 17 nails made of silver.
“Also on the platform are distinct clusters of tiny smooth ceramic spheres or discs, in some cases meant to be carried in the pocket like unstrung worry beads. In a back corridor, a set of ceramic wind chimes resembles something from the Whole Earth Catalog. More suavely 2015 is a set made of clear glass (with the help of a glassblower) that hangs in the gallery’s front window. This second set of wind chimes appears to be held aloft by a rope that extends through a wall to a rock on the yellow platform.”
Kate Newby’s work has been exhibited in New Zealand’s leading contemporary art institutions, including Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; Christchurch Art Gallery; The Adam Art Gallery, Wellington; and Artspace, Auckland.
In 2010 she was the inaugural artist resident at SOMA, Mexico City and undertook residencies at Kunstlerhauser, Worpswede, Germany and The Banff Centre, Canada. In the same year she made a solo exhibition Crawl out your window at the GAK Gesellschaft Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen and created a site-specific installation at the Claremont Museum of Art in Los Angeles as part of a retrospective exhibition on Bas Jan Ader. In 2011, Kate made the solo exhibition I’ll follow you down the road, at Hopkinson Cundy, and the site-specific commissioned project, I’m just like a pile of leaves, for the re-opening of the Auckland Art Gallery.
The exhibition is conjoined with paintings by Australian Helen Johnson.
Original article by Roberts Smith, New York Times, July 16, 2015
