Kathryn Hart

"Interview with Kathryn Hart Exposicion in Coll Alas, 23 January - 20 March 2020"
Radio Interview with Rafa Martinez from Onda Cero Gandia:

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Kathryn Hart: The Psychic Heritage of Powerful Women
"Revisionism" Issue No. 3, The September Issues Magazine, Mary Rozzi, Founder and Creative Director

"Kathryn Hart is an abstract artist who works primarily in sculpture.  Here, in a deeply personal letter on her inspirations and connections to Revisionism, she reflects on the influence of early feminists, the tenacity of the human spirit, the depths of grief, and the power of work that strives towards truth"
(click on image for pdf)
Kathryn Hart: The Psychic Heritage of Powerful Women

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"the other voice"  Kathryn Hart, Part I

by Salvador Ferrer, sociologist and educator for Estestica Pedegogica
 February 14, 2020
Sala Coll Alas de Gandia, Exposicion Space, Spain

All the pieces in the installation interact through the art room like a network paying homage to the lights and shadows of the strong women who lived in the Renaissance...This is an opportunity to think of what we believe is important in our society: the criticism, the reflection, the way of living… that is what the classics did and what Kathryn Hart proposes speaking about the women in the Renaissance...

This is the most important task that art has or its goal in society. The artist encourages us through her work to go far away from these times of superficial approach to knowledge. And another aspect to take into account is that the entire installation also invites us to look inside ourselves, what can we do in a personal way where everyone has to build an interior world for themselves...

The last sense of the installation is to be constructed by the viewer. It is a social process that mixes up life and a certain period of time...And all that becomes part of the viewer’s life as well. They participate in the production of the artwork, in the process Kathryn Hart engaged all of us in a continuous narrative.

Contemporary art helps our community to show and make visible the social problems we have to face as a free and democratic society, and in this proposal in particular, Kathryn Hart stresses the social and vital civic role of women in our western societies that is not completed yet. So if we take for granted that an artist’s action implies a political action we must not forget fighting so as not to allow anybody remains behind. Because if we accept the fact that not everybody deserves the same right to be equal we will become an unworthy society.

Finally, we could say that Kathryn Hart, like many other contemporary artists, seeks to provoke through her work an interior dialogue with ourselves and to open a debate with our community. These experiences which come from artistic works create new relations with the public in order to make more understandable our own lives and the society we live in.

The gift that Kathryn Hart has given to Gandia’s citizens could end like a dream which says: “I’m still here. Will you remember me when I’m gone?”

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"the other voice"  Kathryn Hart, Part II,  Sala Coll Alas (Exposicion Space), Gandia
 2nd Meeting with the art students from Maria Enriquez High School and installing the collaborative art piece

by Salvador Ferrer, sociologist and educator for Estestica Pedegogica
March 31, 2020

 "Shortly before the end of the "The Other Voice" exhibition by American artist Kathryn Hart, we had a date with art students at the Maria Enríquez Institute in Gandia and their teacher Enriqueta Rocher. We looked forward to the work the artist had proposed to them.

 This idea, as we discussed in the previous article, was to complement a piece of the (artist's) installation respecting the materials and the aesthetics of the artistic ensemble. On the one hand, the idea was to show the light that has been gaining for the woman in society from the social and historical shade where it came from. On the other hand, students came up with objects that symbolized, even today, the social role of women, to show that the struggle continues...In the words of Lucia, a student, "everything is metaphorical in some ways." You are right, the metaphor can be seen as an extension of the world. The artists in the role of the creator, builders of the reality, but beyond it, authors who with their creativity expand the world making it a more beautiful and interesting place..."

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Artist in Residency Pop-Up Exhibition & Reception, Truro Center for the Arts
3 Edgewood Way, Truro
September 4, 6pm - 9pm

Kathryn Hart Half artist, half scientist, and half bad ass, wait that's one and half - Kathryn Hart is all that and more. She has created a deeply personal mixed media installation, using , fabric, wire, thread, mirror, lights , shadow, reflection ampules , and re-contextualized-found objects called Widow Bird. Her intelligence , her attention to detail, her love of labour in this work ( as in all her work) allows her to access her most private moments while trying to touch the sky . This one piece created in one week would be enough, but she has also created two other installations in the meadow not to be missed. See why I called her one and a half. ---  Michael David

See full article here
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Identity, Burden and Choice: the Daunting Transitions of Kathryn Hart
DiversionsLa (Los Angeles), by Genie Davis

...Kathryn Hart’s Daunting Transitions takes on a series of daunting topics with grace and a haunting resonance. Looking at identity, burden, and at the fear of and burden and responsibility of choice, the work is all about change in one form or another. It is about gestation, and the poetry of life itself.
Hart’s work is often delicate here, lines and wires and bones and strands that remind the viewer of spider webs, of neurons and veins, of barbed wire, and the paths of stars.  Mysterious and magical, she explores a veritable cosmos of choice and interconnected moments; her works are sculptural weavings, metal curls and lines, fabric and fiber.  “Changing, morphing, redefining is part of being human,” Hart asserts. “The extent of my joy depends upon how much pain I’m willing to take.  I do not live life in the middle. These artworks are about moving forward..."

...Finding the core of her identity when the certainty in her life had slipped away on many fronts, resulted in the show’s creation. It presents a tension, both in terms of its materials and its art, a searching, which the artist describes as a verb, an action, and infinite. “Decision and choice are nouns, finite. The first (searching) is open-ended and reveals opportunities; the latter is a responsibility and creates boundaries...”
...Altogether riven with light, shadow, line, and space, these Daunting Transitions are spare in color and background, luminous and gorgeous, filled with emotion and contemplative energy; alive and shifting: their own organisms birthed by Hart.

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Kathryn Hart On the Move: Transitions, Tranquility and Flight Paths
Gallery&Studio Arts Journal (NYC), by Diane Root
19 January 2019

...Hart’s work is both autobiographical and abstract of both ideas and emotions. Hart’s works conjure up the inner solace of the healing heart—a new breath of oxygen and rebirth...

The wires recall the strings of violins or cellos— an orchestral composition of sorts, a fugue that both embraces and escapes. “Lines,” she says, “are also tangled emotions, truths, a web of stories.” Indeed, what tangled webs she weaves. There is a silent music here, one that is heard with the eyes.

Even the arabesque of shadows cast upon the wall are part and parcel of these artworks— visual echoes seen, if not heard. Echoes that resonate, sometimes muted, sometimes sharp depending on the ambient light. The shadows hover, move and mutate.

...Hart’s works are all about moving forward and the tenacity of the human spirit. “Changing, morphing, redefining is part of being human.” The wire sculptures incorporate rib bones, mostly deer, she says. “Rib bones protect the heart…graceful line and full of energy.”

The heart is precisely what Hart is all about. Kathryn Hart has taken flight and has made, once again, a three-point landing..."

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Grandeur in Small Sizes
Gallery&Studio Arts Journal (NYC), by Anne Rudder
12 January 2019

...In eight small mixed media hanging sculptures, the series entitled "Amalgam," Kathryn Hart confronts the viewer with constructed pieces made from handmade paper impregnated with twine and employing other various elements, among them, ink, found objects and resin, all incorporated in organic forms, generating tactile whole entities.  Hart's signature style underscores her on-going search for life's meaning through diverse themes, which seem to coalesce allowing the viewer to experience a range of deep feelings..."

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Thoughts on Kathryn Hart's SEARCHING
Gallery&Studio Arts Journal (NYC), by Anne Rudder
10 June 2018

...Kathryn Hart's visceral and profoundly moving work, like Robert Motherwell's Spanish Elegies or Eva Hesse's sculptures, creates pieces weightily accessing the essence of experience and exploring feelings about life and death.  Hart is a survivor, tenacious intimately passionate while analytical, and a champion of life who names emotions, identifying what it means to live.  Her recent exhibit, "SEARCHING," at The School of Visual Arts, demonstrates the range of her talents...a personal seeking for truth and identity where she is compelled to give existence import.  She views life as a series of choices made consciously and unconsciously, but not burdensome, which become a liberating expression of elemental forces...

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Kathryn Hart: Sculptural Art Work with Visual and Emotional Depth
Diversions LA, by Genie Davis
12 January 2018 

Resilient. Hopeful. Poignant. And deep. Above all, deep. Kathryn Hart creates three-dimensional works that are as dimensional physically as they are emotionally – a look into the heart, soul, and spirit. The sculptural dimension to her paintings is an adjunct to her art, not a gimmick, but rather a way in which to delve even deeper into the essence of her work...

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Another Fine Foray in Beacon
Gallery&Studio Arts Journal (NYC), by Anne Rudder
8 July 2018

...Kathryn Hart lends her formidable talents to the show by exhibiting low-keyed abstract photographs of ancient animal bone; an extension of her “Searching” series of work on display in numerous galleries in New York City during May and June. The photos of bleached bones in these pieces are one-time occurrences, never to be repeated, where the sculptor transforms reminders of mortality into sensuous, unexpected, mysterious markers of eternal energies...

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Culture Avenue, Poland Culture Outside the Country
23 August 2017

About the exhibition "Metamorphosis" at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, NY, co-operation with sculptor Kathryn Hart and the announcement of September's prestigious exhibition in Warsaw at the SD Gallery Szucha 8...

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Metamorphosis 2017 (Warsaw) - by Bartosz Milewski for ArtInfo.pl
21 September 2017

Kathryn Hart's assemblages made of rather common materials...can bring to mind the natural fascination of combining various objects into constructs and...creating amazing stories...although this is only one of the possible interpretations, because the purpose of artistic abstract installations (which bring to mind Rauschenberg's...or Duchamp or Dadaistic collage) may be the induction of specific moods...

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Two Artists Turn From Tragedy to Triumph at Howland Cultural Center
Gallery&Studio NYC, by Anne Rudder
August 2017

...both Maryanska and Hart demonstrate their formidable talents in forty-seven works, using their own reactions to repeated personal catastrophes, vanquishing memories through pieces of drama and depth, providing a transforming emotional experience for anyone lucky enough to have had the opportunity to view them...Although...(they)...work in different mediums, they reveal powerful, shared threads, weaving works of deep emotion bearing witness to their own life experiences...as artistic statements of victory...

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Inspired Energies at the Beacon Residencies
Gallery&Studio, NYC, by Anne Rudder
October 2016, 

...Mixed media artist, Kathryn Hart, mines profound feelings in her current works.  With a psychological darkness to them, she confronts human suffering and tragedy.  Her titles, weathervanes to a scarred soul, reveal uncomfortable emotions honestly.  Self-evident, in pieces such as "Pretending to be Fine" and "Dinner with Lazarus," the detritus of found objects, wire, string and burlap become the artist's unequivocal barometers of pain...

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"Arte Internacional Trevisan,"  a Sala Prado del Ateneo, Madrid
Descubrir el ARTE, XVIII no. 212, October 2016, by Javier Villalba

"Comisariada por Paola Trevisan y Rosa Mascarell Dauder, La tercera edicion de este certamen invita a artistas de los cinco continentes a las Sala Prado del Ateneo..."

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"reSOURCED," Collage and Assemblage Source Material Explored
Catalogue Essay by Lila Pickus
3 June - 16 July, 2016, IDEA SPACE at Colorado College Contemporary Art Museum/
Edith Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center

"...constructions inspire a curiosity for the heretofore untold stories of each individual object and image, while seemingly effortless redefining the intended purpose and context of each now newly-integrated element.

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Artistic Explorations are Alive in Beacon
by Anne Rudder
October 2015, Gallery&Studio, NYC

Kathryn Hart, a well-known abstractionist digs deep into the human psyche in her sculptural canvas constructions and deconstructions,  Her mixed media piece, "Alchemist" seeks to demonstrate that diverse found materials; in this case, burlap, paper, metal, glass, and string are the ingredients of esoteric transformation.  Her work is tactile, stark and unvarnished dealing with the dark parts of human experience...

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Interview with Diane Root, Art Critic, Gallery&Studio Magazine, Spring 2015

Kathryn Hart: Unapologetic, Unadulterated and Unvarnished
by Diane Root, May 2015

Jute. Hemp. Burlap. Homely, homespun, humble - hardly the stuff of which dreams are made unless your name is Kathryn Hart.  Yet such are the roughhewn type of raw materials that, more often than not, form the underlying layers of many of Hart's very sophisticated artwork. Homespun, it is not.  Sculptural, it is.

The late George Canatta, an abstract expressionist painter and former teacher at the Art Students League, once said, “In the hands of an artist, childhood is never very far away.” That is certainly true of Hart, whose equestrian background included those materials as stable and familiar components in her art...The sculptural quality of her surfaces somehow manages to both conceal and reveal simultaneously...

...Fissures and tenuous, tentative threads, strings, slim cords are cast with abandon across a plane suggesting the inherent frailty of our mortal coil. Still others sport holes and geometries that incorporate their immediate environment, thereby becoming part of the work itself. Such are the windows into Hart’s world, and within it, she molds mysteries...

...Tejo Cole wrote in his column “On Photography” (The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Feb. 22, 2015) something that seems remarkably appropriate to describe many of Hart’s works: “What is dark is not empty: if you know how to see, there are glories in the shadows.” That is not to say that there are not glories in Hart’s light.

Hart explores her inner darkness and her inner light. In so doing she lays bare our own psyches. “

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1. Read Interview Q&A here (pdf)

Kathryn Hart, an abstract painter, and sculptor, is an international award-winning, extremely prolific artist...Hers are works to be studied, not simply glimpsed, as they are imbued with meanings that only become apparent after considerable thought.

...In “Unearthly Misfit,” a mixed media, burlap, and found object construction, the artist’s palette is also subdued, though here black is the primary color. This intriguing work evokes the feelings of alienation characteristic of someone who never belongs, an outsider, always on the periphery looking in....Hart’s works are deeply mystical constructions revealing inner truths about herself and women’s place in the wider world...     

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A Treasure Trove of Memories at New Century Artists Gallery
by Anne Rudder
Spring 2015, Gallery&Studio

The painter and sculptor, Kathryn Hart presents her intimacies in all their raw power. Combining found objects with painted surfaces, her work is dramatic and sculptural as she examines the vulnerability of human beings...

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"Dreams Come to Light at New Century Artists
by Anne Rudder
Spring 2015, Gallery&Studio

Kathryn Hart, in her mixed media piece "Lunar Face," constructs a dramatic three-dimensional entity on the anchoring picture plane. The painted surface textile is torn as if exposing wounds below the surface...

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Sincronias, Ateneo de Madrid (Museo del Prado)
October, 2014

Highline
by Maurice Taplinger
February 2014, Gallery&Studio, NYC

Kathryn Hart has been attracting considerable attention lately for her tactile, mostly black and white (sometimes with glistening splashes of red added to increase the visceral effect), found object assemblages...have a queasy seductiveness, sending out intimations of mortality and other distress signals that grip the viewer in the pit of the stomach and refuse to let go...

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Awakening
by Byron Coleman
February 2014, Gallery&Studio NYC

Kathryn Hart transforms pictorial space with rugged mixed media compositions... like most of Hart’s compositions, merges painting and sculpture with often unsettling subject matter... In Hart’s “Dialogue with a Madwoman,” a cloth form resembling a dead chicken painted black and suspended upside down by its feet appears tethered like a spider to its web to a large open frame by a maze of knotted wire and thread. Casting its shadow eerily on the gallery wall, like all of Kathryn Hart’s recent work this is strong stuff, not for the squeamish...

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"Passages/Pasajes"  Ateneo de Madrid (Museo del Prado), Madrid
10-30 October, 2013

watch video here
ABC News, Espana, "Pasajes," Ateneo de Madrid, October 2013

Not a School as Such, but Four Kindred Painters
by Maurice Taplinger
June 2013, Gallery&Studio, NYC  

The mixed media paintings of Kathryn Hart are mired in matter, their power emanating from their very physical palpability and the artist's unique way of imbuing the actual with its own transcendent mystery. Hart's mixed media work on canvas "Hope Pit" is a perfect example, with most of its surface thickly encrusted with a sensuously tactile black tar-like impasto...

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Kathryn Hart Excavates Mystery from the Palpable
by Ed McCormack, Editor in Chief, Gallery&Studio
June 2012

...In Hart’s case, in keeping with her use of the phrase “from the gut,” the surface takes on a visceral, almost sentient quality of skin, although paradoxically when figures appear in her compositions, they seep into her cracked and fissured epidermal surfaces like phantoms or shadows. Hart possesses an apparently unshakable sense of purpose and certainty about her creative vocation.

Obviously, it did not take long for Hart to meld...early influences into a unique personal style, which imparts a relief-like sculptural dimension to the art of painting...even while preserving the sanctity of the two dimensional picture plane so central to modernist aesthetics. For there is no room for illusion in Hart’s paintings, which excavate a deep mystery from the actual physically palpable substance of pigment...enhancing the the sense of a submerged narrative that lends Hart’s work much of its mystery, depth, and poetry...an exquisite touch, demonstrating the delicacy that, along with their ruggedness of her surfaces, lends yet another asset to the paintings of Kathryn Hart...

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"The Cauldron" Bubbles Effervescently
by Byron Coleman
Septemer 2012, for Gallery&Studio

...But even their considerable tactile appeal is upstaged by the imagery that Hart conjures up, with universally generalized neoprimitive figures that have been likened by more than one critic for the raw emotional power to the existential Everymen...

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"Liberated Dreams," curated by Paola Trevisan
21-29 April 2012.  International Exhibition of Contemporary Art. Estense Castle Museum, Ferrara, Italy

 watch video here

Palo Alto's Newest Art Gallery Thrives
by Pierre Bienaime for Palo Alto Patch
Review of "Anima," April 2012

Artist Kathryn Hart showed a series of earthy paintings, each carrying a small, domestic object that brought with it the feeling that these were scenes being observed through a window, and into a home...

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Many Paths Converge in New Century Group Show
by Maurice Taplinger
September 2011, Gallery&Studio

...The symbolic figures painted by Kathryn Hart are, paradoxically, physical and spectral at the same time...

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