Kathryn Hart

BIO, Resume, and Statement

SELECT BIO

Artist Kathryn Hart (b. 1961) plumbs the depths of love, loss, and transformation’s threshold.  Themes manifest in hanging sculpture, installation, photography, and monoprints incorporating a personal diary of objects and symbols. Shadow, light, reflection, and gesture expand and distill the artwork’s presence. 

Recent solo shows include Cultural Department of Gandia, Spain; European Cultural Centre, coinciding with the 58th Venice Biennale; Polytechnika Krakowska, Krakow; School of Visual Arts, NY, NY; Galeria SD Szucha 8, Warsaw; Andre Zarre, NY, NY; Howland Cultural Center, Beacon, NY; and New Century Artists, NY, NY.

Select group venues include the Ateneo de Madrid; Chelsea Art Museum, NYC; Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo; Academy of Fine Arts, Sarajevo; Novi Hram Gallery, Bosnia; Book Art Museum, Lodz, PL; Museum of Writing and Poetry, Grebocin, PL:  Oceanside MOA, California; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; M. David & Co., Brooklyn, NY; Archeological Museum, Gandia, Spain; Dar Al-Kalima Gallery, Bethlehem, Palestine; Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Wales; Art Spot Korin, Kyoto, Japan; Galerie Arytmia, Krakow, PL; and Nevada Museum of Art + Environment.

Hart supports and exhibits in humanitarian projects worldwide.  Sponsorships span Ajuntament de Gandia, European Cultural Center, European Cultural Academy, Council of Europe, the Ministries of Art and Culture of France and Poland, and the US Embassies.  Hart has been awarded by the United Nations among others. The artist and her work have been critically featured in many media and on public TV (USA and Spain).

Hart holds a BA in International Relations from Boston University and an MBA from the University of Texas (Arlington). She continues to explore, hone, and expand her artistic expression. Since 2019, she has worked extensively with installation art pioneer, Judy Pfaff (Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, Bard Faculty) and Michael David (Guggenheim Fellow, artist, curator).  She has studied with Molly Zuckerman-Hartung (Yale Critic in Paint/Printmaking Dept) and other esteemed artists, writers, critics, and curators through the Yellow Chair Salon Residencies, USA, the Node Center (Berlin) and European Cultural Academy (Venice, IT), and others.

Select public collections include Cultura Gandia, SP; Nevada Museum of Art + Environment; Myslenice Cultural Center, Poland; University of Texas at Austin; and Galeria 33, Ostrow, PL. Before devoting herself to full-time studio practice, Hart had a long career in international medical research focusing on organ and tissue transplantation in the latter years.

Hart resides in a red rock canyon adjacent to a Colorado national forest. Enveloped by dynamic nature, a rock amphitheater and the ingenious geodesic dome studio structure of triangles in floating compression provide her a unique environment to create works that delve into being suspended in a temporal and infinite existence.

Kathryn Hart serves on the Board of Directors for the global nonprofit Artnauts Art Collective (https://www.artnauts.org)

Bio Google Link

STATEMENT
 

I make work that plumbs the depths of love, loss, and transformation’s threshold.  These themes become visible through hanging sculpture, installation, black and white photography, drawing, and monoprints.  Chosen materials stem from a private diary and refer to caretaking others, bodily scars, and childhood. Airy sculptures of long horsehair, barbed wire, glass medicinal ampoules, latex tubing, and bioluminescent resins sway from ambient conditions.  Shadow and reflection amplify the large works.; meticulous and intimate labor invites close examination.

My current focus is deeply personal.  For a decade, I saw my late husband in looping cycles of striving and fading through the stages of his terminal illness. His determination to expand in the face of growing limitations stays with me forever.  I walk through the forest next to my home and have noticed its changes for over 20 years.  It displays a similar unyielding effort to thrive and renew in an environment that can no longer support its former life.  Corporeal energy fades and transforms into its essence.  While no longer earthly, its presence remains palpable.

My black and white photography series convey elastic time and immediate moments.  The photos blur, bend, stretch, and stop time.  Scenes posing a tension between light and dark, renewal and decay, conflict and harmony, and the timeless and the unique interest me.  The silver gelatin printing process offers lush darks rich for exploration that suggests the world is not as binary as it might seem.

Many materials I use serve as fractals, complete polaroids of my past.  Propelled by the requisite vulnerability and honesty of bearing witness, I work to extract raw, embedded emotion and bring it to light.  This process sheds light into myself.  Childhood weekends on a Texas farm and a scientific background have born an unflinching viewpoint. 

  ...Hart possesses an apparently unshakable sense of purpose and certainty about her creative vocation...a unique personal style...which excavates a deep mystery from the actual physically palpable substance of pigment...a sense of a submerged narrative that lends Hart's work much of its mystery, depth, and poetry."