SWIMMERS 2007-2021
Description
Catherine Lepp’s Swimmers series arises from years of observing her children in the water: diving, coasting, surfing—and wiping out. These works reflect the freedom of bodies utterly outside the context of day-to-day living, away from hard surfaces, unyielding boundaries and the habitual axis imposed by gravity.
Alternately tumbling, turning and held aloft within the melee of aquatic forces, Lepp’s swimmers are a beautifully awkward confusion of heads, knees, and knowingly rendered soles of feet. The swimmers’ dynamism is brought forth through staggered brushstrokes capturing at once reflected light and volume, barely maintaining their solidity amidst a playful chaos. The perspective of the work shifts along with the changing nature of the subject: Sometimes the figures are seen from above, sometimes from below. Lepp’s paintings slowly suggest that the artist, and perhaps by extension the viewer, is both spectator and participant—sharing the same fluid space, the vibrations and current communications taking place beneath the waters’ surface. When speaking of her work the artist references influences as diverse as Goya’s enigmatic figures and Hiroshige’s stately images of the absolute power of nature: a polarity that in Lepp’s work has given way to tender portraits of lives in flux.
—Christina Kee August 2021
First Solo Show MARK BORGHI GALLERY SAG HARBOR September 10- October 7, 2021