Katie van Scherpenberg: Traces: 1968 – 2007
Cecilia Brunson Projects is delighted to present the second UK exhibition by Katie van Scherpenberg. Drawing together works produced in Brazil between 1960s-2000s, Traces gives unique focus to the depth of van Scherpenberg’s environmental investigations. Her gestural, transmutational work offers a tender and thoughtful approach that counters the monumental land art practices unfolding concurrently in North America and Europe. The tenets of both painting and environmental thought are dismantled to a point of pure simplicity in works such as Jardim Vermelho [Red Garden] (1986), a landmark event in the history of Brazilian painting.
Van Scherpenberg’s work is immeasurably influenced by her time spent in the Amazon, her observations of its landscape and her particular notion of it as a living painting, carrying colour and a sense of continual evolution. Creating landscape paintings that are ephemeral, alive, and inevitably consumed by the earth, she offers a point of reference for one of the most pressing themes challenging artists today.