January 30 – April 11, 2010
Katherine Kadish: Seasons
Lower Level Galleries
Cost: Free

Horizon, 1, 2009 Oil on canvas, 48" x 40"

Final Weekend - Closes April 11
Seasons showcases recent works by Yellow Springs painter and printmaker Katherine Kadish.

For Katherine Kadish, color itself is a medium and the emotion color evokes is the message. In creating her art, Kadish uses the visual world as a starting point and then simplifies the forms she sees whether they are flowers or figures. Steeped in the luxuriant world of nature, Kadish often leaves behind all reference to the known subject and her pictures become a poetic dialogue of color and pattern. Using the primary colors of red, yellow and blue sparingly, Kadish emphasizes greens, oranges and violets and the infinite subtle variations possible. The Dayton Art Institute thanks the artist and the other lenders for making this exhibition possible. 

>> Read More: Katherine Kadish is profiled at DaytonDailyNews.com

>> Photos: View images of Kadish's work at DaytonDailyNews.com

Katherine Kadish was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She began attending Saturday art classes at the Carnegie Museum at age nine and later received her B.F.A. in painting and design from Carnegie Mellon University and her M.A. in art history from the University of Chicago. Kadish has exhibited her work internationally in addition to having been awarded a number of prestigious fellowships and residencies. The artist lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and maintains her studio in the nearby village of Clifton.

Artist's Statement:
The visual and the tactile entered my consciousness at an early age.  I remember the colors and smells of my aunt’s garden in Pittsburgh, the light through trees and shadows cast.  I remember the excitement of wind turning leaves before a storm and making the great poplars clatter, and especially the movement of water in nature, and the fascination of reflections, the shifting patterns of ripples and waves, and how all these elements changed with the hours and the seasons.
 
Much later, I began to tend and observe my own gardens and became even more conscious of seasonal changes in light, color, texture, and mood, and the more subtle differences from year to year within the same season.  The garden, and nature at large, are perfect metaphors for our own passage through life.
 
I am fond of ambiguity: in edges, in shapes, in interpretation…things whose connections with their visual neighbors are peculiar or unpredictable. I am drawn to surprising relationships of colors or shapes, sometimes in the natural world but also in architecture, or a painting, or something observed that simply resonates for no apparent reason.  I usually work with a sense of location in the back of my mind: a remembered place, an arrangement of shapes, a particular sky, or an emotional state.  Sometimes I imagine an overview; sometimes ground level.
 
I hope that viewers will feel immersed in color, light, suggestions of movement and of space beyond the confines of the canvas or the borders of a plate.
- Katherine Kadish, January 2010

This exhibition is curated by Kay Koeninger, Associate Professor of Art at Sinclair Community College.