KATHERINE PORTER AESTHETIC COMBUSTION
You Say
2019, oil on canvas, 50” x 46.25”
AESTHETIC COMBUSTION
AESTHETIC COMBUSTION
In this new exhibition of Katherine Porter’s works entitled Aesthetic Combustion, paintings explode with tangles of color lines and gestures spiral out of backgrounds toward the viewer. Everywhere there are color relationships that enliven Porter’s works and allow the her marks to dance freely, whatever their trajectories and however they interact with shapes in various frenzied geometric configurations. The activity on the painting surfaces is like an agora of festivity where one’s eyes take delight and the mind finds refuge and comfort. Enormous charismatic energy emanates from the complex compositions created by Porter’s uniquely vigorous and enthusiastic form of picture-making, a form whose authenticity bristles with endless combinations of colors, gestures, geometries, and symbols that interact to generate a kind of spontaneous aesthetic combustion.
This exhibition follows the “Brilliance of Spontaneity Untamed” retrospective last year at LewAllen Galleries that reintroduced Porter’s paintings to the artworld to great acclaim. It was Porter’s first major show since the 1990s, after her New York gallerist, André Emmerich, closed his renowned gallery and when Porter decided to remove herself from the mainstream of the artworld to focus her energies on her artmaking in Maine.
The 2024 retrospective generated tremendous excitement and revived significant interest in the artist’s work. Porter and her art were selected for the cover story of the September/ October 2024 edition of the venerable Art & Antiques magazine.
Sadly, just a few weeks following the show’s opening, having reached the pinnacle of her career, Porter unexpectedly passed away at the age of 83. Eulogistic writings subsequently appeared in numerous publications. Her obituary in Artforum aptly captures a sense of her work and also includes a wonderful quotation by the legendary art critic Peter Schjeldahl:
Though working alongside a cohort who included Louise Fishman, Suzan Frecon, Mary Heilmann, Elizabeth Murray, and Pat Steir, Porter stood out for the crackling charge of her large-scale canvases, across which danced lines, spheres, swirls, and various hard-angled shapes, appearing to spill from above or float around one another. “Her paintings have a theatrical quality and the rough gaiety of big dogs,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in a 1979 issue of Artforum. “They are also manically sophisticated…”
“Rough gaiety of big dogs” continues to be an apt description of Porter’s outer-facing revelries of plangent colors and active lines and
marks that characterized her assertive paintings for the next four and half decades of her career and life.
A fascinating aspect of Porter’s work is how protean her methods and uses of a relatively limited visual vocabulary of elements – lines, polygons, circles, swirls, spheres, grids, etc. – was in terms of yielding endlessly diverse pictorial results, including their efficacy in realizing her intention that the paintings possess and communicate meanings. About these dimensions of her work, Artforum noted:
Porter was gifted in infusing forms that by nature ought to be emotionless—a triangle, a cube—with feeling: A shape conjuring a sense of feather-lightness in one canvas might evoke a lugubrious heft in another, with such stark contrasts often occurring within a single work. As well, her paintings frequently commented on social and political circumstances and events, not directly, but in terms of the ripples they cast out into the wider world.
Notably, too, when finished, there is not a part of a painting that seems unattended or an afterthought. There is an engaging sense of finality in her works; no part of her canvases appears unaddressed. Porter’s paintings truly present as complex totalities of great artistic
creation and unity, laid down on canvas as though by a burst of divinely inspired Promethean combustion.
So much of Porter’s work seems to be imbued with and animated by the sense of Prometheus fire and struggle. “My paintings are about chaos, constant changes, opposites, clashes, big movements in nature. … History, natural things, short wars,” she told Art in America in 1982. “I try to put everything into a picture. What you see is what you come up against in the world.” Underlying her magnificently dramatic paintings is a desire to evince in her work the forces swirling about in the world about her, those at work in the present and those transforming it. In that regard, one might sense upon close engagement with these paintings a deeper feeling akin to visual poetry, as though they resonate the social and political forces of change and conflict, like a Greek epic, or even ecstasy in celebration of better times that follows from destruction as part of the natural cycle in life that she believed was an evitable part of things.
At her core, Porter was an intellectual optimist and deeply passionate. Emotionally, she said she is drawn to “every beautiful thing.” And certainly, there is great beauty in her work, beauty thought of in the sense of aesthetic aspects
(Detail) Untitled, n.d., oil on canvas, 42” x 48”
Joie de Vivre
n.d., oil on canvas, 87” x 138”
that touch something deep within the viewer that absorbs one’s attention in a pleasingly meaningful way. Overlaying the tensions expressed in the agitated surfaces of her canvases is a jubilation of colors reflective of the exuberance of mind and spirit that operated in Porter to motivate nearly six decades of utterly original and endlessly varied paintings full of rich complexity. “Manically sophisticated,” as Schjeldahl called it. The generative kinetic energy that pulsated in her paintings never waned and conferred on them endless unpredictable, spontaneous life.
Indeed, one of the great gifts an artist of Porter’s enormously consequential talent extends to others through their art is the enduring capacity of that art to confer profound pleasure and emotional enrichment. Unlike with other objects one acquires, this capacity of a Porter painting is inexhaustible. The remembered enjoyment of an exotic trip fades with time; the experience of pleasure with a great painting is had each time one passes by it. The power of her canvas to intrigue and enchant goes on and on. It never becomes obsolete or out of fashion. Its profusion of colors and lines and shapes and brushstrokes – their intensities, directions, densities, thicknesses, lengths, textures – those elements that synergistically combine to define the personality of a painting – they are everlasting and permanent.
The painting that gave pleasure when acquired – through the uncanny and fortuitous authority aesthetics possesses over human senses of wellbeing, joy, and pleasure – will continue to enrich and ennoble the life of its fortunate owner for the duration of a lifetime. Indeed, just as the renowned art critic, John Russell,
writing in the New York Times described Porter’s art back in 1983 as “a one-woman fireworks display”, there is little doubt that still today her paintings, old and new, pop with the same visual pyrotechnics.
Simply put, Katherine Porter is one of the great figures in modern and contemporary American art. Her paintings rip rich complex vibrancy out of the mundane lassitude and social acedia of the world and times she often saw around her. The generative energy of her passionately original work lends a relentless dynamism to the fiery colors and exultant geometries within. Her spirited, even heroic, force is undeniable, and projects her singular unremitting voice.
Porter’s paintings can readily hang next to those of giants in the field, irrespective of gender –those of Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, or Joan Mitchell for instance - to whom she is a natural and equally brilliant successor. It is no wonder that her confident work is avidly collected by major art institutions, currently held by well more than 40, in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney.
The aesthetic fire in the paintings of Katherine Porter burns bright -- and ever shall it.
-- Kenneth R. Marvel
East Port
oil on canvas, 54” x 44”
Harborside Spin
oil on canvas, 80” x
Sunset in Maine with Yellow Frame 2023, oil on canvas, 48” x 42.25”
Begin Again
2016, oil on canvas, 41.75” x 38”
Blow Up
oil on canvas, 40” x 44”
Hearts of a Wind Blown Flame 2017, oil on canvas, 38” x 44”
oil on canvas, 18” x 18”
Cathedral Arcs
oil on linen, 69.5” x 58.25”
Night Music (Cake Walk)
2019, oil on canvas, 48” x 42” x 1.25”
Triangle Tango 2019, oil on canvas, 36” x 36”
To Phil Ochs
2003, oil on canvas, 66” x 50”
2009, oil on canvas, 70” x 40”
Michaelangelo on the Scaffolding 2017-18, oil on canvas, 50” x 42” x 1.25”
Roadtrip West
1973, oil on canvas on panel, 20.25” x 20.37”
Sunset
2015, oil on canvas, 42” x 38” x 1.25”
Three Squares a Day 2016-17, oil on canvas, 44” x 44”
Yellow Lines
2017, oil on canvas, 42” x 38”
2009, oil on canvas, 50.25” x 79.25”
Autumn - Port Latour 2000, oil on canvas, 70” x 52”
Katherine Porter stands out as one of the great women of American abstract painting. Her incredibly dynamic and diverse range of works are held in the collections of over 40 national and international museums. Porter’s works are marked by her bold brushwork, vibrant pallette, and playful use of line and shape -- never making the same painting twice. The artist had a powerful sense of expressive authenticity and a resolve that art should maintain deep unity with an artist’s social, political, and personal issues.
Katherine Porter |1941-2024 | b. Cedar Rapids, IA
Education
1961 Colorado College
1963 Boston University
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2025 Aesthetic Combustion, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
2024 Brilliance of Spontaneity Untamed, LewAllen Galler ies, Santa Fe, NM
2016 Line/Place/Time/Trace: Paintings by Katherine Por ter & Wirework by Ellen Wieske, Room 83 Spring, Watertown, MA
2015 Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, Austria
2013 Katherine Porter, Sheffield Van Buren, Allston, MA
2011 Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, Austria
2008 Katherine Porter: Celestial Electric Set, Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC
2008 Katherine Porter: Splended Cities, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA
2006 Katherine Porter: Recent Work, Aucocisco Gallery, Portland, ME
2003 Katherine Pavlis Porter: Living on This Earth, Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA
2003 Katherine Porter & Deborah Kahn: New Paintings, Les Yeux du Monde, Charlottesville, VA
1999 Paintings and Drawings by Katherine Porter, Les Yeux du Monde, Charlottesville, VA
1997 Works by Katherine Porter, Salander O’Reilly, New York, NY
1996 Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by Katherine Porter, Les Yeux du Monde, Charlottesville, VA
1994 The Usual Suspects Plus One: Work by Katherine Porter, Fayerweather Gallery at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
1992 Katherine Porter: Graphic Works, Wiegand Gallery, College of Notre Dame, Belmont, CA
1992 A Visual Dialogue: Katherine Porter and Yvonne Jacquette, Main Coast Artists Gallery, Rockport, ME
1991 Katherine Porter: Paintings/Drawings, Bowdoin Col lege Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME
1990 Katherine Porter: New Paintings, André Emmerich Gallery, New York
1988 Knoedler Gallery, London
1988 Katherine Porter: New Paintings, André Emmerich Gallery, New York
1987 Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
1987 Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI
1986 David McKee Gallery, New York
1986 William Halsey Gallery, Charleston, SC
1985 Retrospective, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis Universi ty, Waltham, MA
1984 Katherine Porter: I Am An American... Drawings and Small Paintings, Cape Split Place Gallery, Addison, ME
1984 David McKee Gallery, New York
1983 Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL
1983 Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA
1982 Katherine Porter: Sensuality of Justice, David McKee Gallery, New York
1981 David McKee Gallery, New York
1980 Katherine Porter: Works on Paper 1969-1979, Achen bach Foundation for Graphic Arts, in conjunction with The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Newport Harbor Museum, San Francisco, CA; Newport Harbor, CA
1980 David McKee Gallery, New York
1979 David McKee Gallery, New York
1979 Alpha Gallery, (Two-person exhibition), Boston, MA
1978 David McKee Gallery, New York
1976 Harcus Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA
1975 David McKee Gallery, New York
1973 Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA
1972 Henri Gallery, Washington, D.C.
1972 Parker 470 Gallery, Boston, MA
1971 Parker 470 Gallery, Boston, MA
Selected Public Collections
Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Detroit Art Institute, Detroit, MI
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Gemeentemuseum of The Hague, The Hague, Netherlands
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
