KATY MORAN

The abstraction of Moran’s paintings exists in a unique place wherein pictorial allusion and material obduracy find peaceful accord. In each work, Moran’s finely tuned techniques conjure scenes that can sometimes be suggestive of landscape, still life or portraiture while exploring colour, composition and gesture. Her titles, similarly, are at times literal, random, and autobiographical, almost moving freely with the gestures in each painting. Certain works have titles relation to their source inspiration such as Bust, while others are named with spare, intimate, and often playful musings which relate to the imagery that come to light in the work, such as cloud face (2019), or still life with nothing (2019).

Recently described as an ​‘abstract painter of figurative mood’, Moran enlists a wide scope of mark-making to conjure different atmospheres in each painting. In this latest body of work, every chosen surface is readymade including found framed paintings. She works her own brushstrokes over these supports, sometimes leaving fragments of the original layer to show through, at other times obscuring it entirely. As Moran produced this body of work over the course of the last year following a move to the countryside, the paintings too seem to move with the seasons. Abstract marks begin to take on pictorial elements of still-life arrangements or landscapes, and the colour palette, dominated by earthy greys and piercing blues, registers the seasonal changes.

Katy Moran lives and works in Hertfordshire. She was born in Manchester in 1975 and completed an MA Fine Art in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2005. Katy Moran’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater , NY, USA (2019); Parasol Unit for Contemporary Art, London (2015); the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus OH, USA (2010); Tate St Ives, St Ives (2009); and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2008). Her work has been included in the recent exhibitions Painter Painter, Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, USA (2013); Contemporary Painting, 1960 to the Present: Selections from the SFMOMA Collection, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA, USA (2012); and Art Now: Strange Solution, Tate Britain, London (2008).