Katherine Kadish

Katherine Kadish, painter and printmaker, has exhibited since 1973 in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Canada, the U.K., Japan and China. Her abstract and expressive paintings and monotypes are concerned primarily with color and shape relationships, with light and with gesture. They are inspired, in part, by nature, by Japanese and Chinese calligraphy and by the Fauve painters of France. In her most recent work, elements of the geometry of the city and architecture has entered her work in counterpoint to the organic shapes of nature and the human gesture.

Kadish, working with Master Printer Sheila Marbain, uses a process to make her monotypes which fuses elements of silk screen printing with painting and drawing, yielding unique results. Referred to as “oil and wax,” a stretched silk screen is clamped upright or set flat, and Kadish paints and draws directly on it with oil paint and solvent. When the screen is ready, it is hinged into printing position over a piece of printing paper and the image is squeegeed through the screen with a wax medium onto the paper. The wax holds the colors in place and retains brush marks and gives luminosity to the print.

“The monotypes of Katherine Kadish exhibit spontaneity, joyous abandon of brushstroke, glimpses of a fleeting reality, momentary glimmers of light or shifting horizon lines. Nature - a sense of place on the planet - lingers beneath each image, informing the sinuous lines and shifting tonal shadows, playing games with perspective and perception.”

Kadish’s work is included in the collections of the British Museum, the New York Public Library, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Zimmerli Museum (Rutgers University), the Dayton Art Institute, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum (Cornell University), GTE Corp., Pfizer, Inc. (NYC), North Carolina National Bank, and many other public, corporate and private collections. Her work also has appeared in two collaborative exhibitions with poets: Patterns (mixed media paintings & assemblages) at the DePree Art Center of Hope Collage, Holland, Michigan, and The Cape Split Cycle monotypes by Katherine Kadish & poems by Sue Standing, a traveling exhibition mounted and circulated by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Kadish currently lives and works in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and in New York City.