Kate Shepherd

For the New Zealand women's rights campaigner, see Kate Sheppard.
Kate Shepherd

Royal Blue Range Tight Floor Overpass, 2003, enamel on panels
Born 1961 (age 53–54)
New York City, New York
Nationality American
Known for Painting

Kate Shepherd (born 1961 in New York City) is an American artist whose work has been shown in galleries and museums since 1996. In her unique approach to painting, Shepherd calls on her training in art and architecture, applying thread-like lines of oil paint upon highly saturated layers of enamel. The refined lines suggest a diagrammatic drawing of recognizable and referential structures, as well as more abstracted forms. Shepherd's works can be found in numerous public collections, including The Phillips Collection, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery among others. She is represented by Galerie Lelong in New York City and Paris, Anthony Meier Fine Art in San Francisco, and Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston.

While they show a strong sense of resolve, her paintings invoke a sensitivity of personal association and recollection. Her color is chosen to evoke either the emotional content of the work or to self-consciously show and contradict the trope at hand. The delicate lines are juxtaposed against glossy, durable enamel, a paint often used for architectural and industrial surfaces. She uses joined wood panels, rather than canvas which enables a mirror-like surface. Viewers often see their own reflection as much as the applied image. Hence the paintings function in real space and implied space simultaneously.

Shepherd also makes more blatant works about color using screen printing and painted wood. Some include triangles based in Josef Albers’ pedagogy. The wood works span from stackable toy blocks to jigsaw puzzles.

Exhibitions

Shepherd has had solo exhibitions at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; Otis College of Art & Design, Los Angeles, California; the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, among many gallery exhibitions.

She is represented in the permanent collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana Lannan Foundation, Marfa, Texas List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts New York Public Library, New York, New York Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

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