Throb

Katharine Kuharic
Throb

May 27 - June 25, 2004

P•P•O•W is very pleased to present THROB, an exhibition of paintings by Katharine Kuharic. The exhibition will be comprised of a range of paintings dating from 1998 to the present, a period during which Kuharic hones her combination of political surrealism and pop art realism. A full color catalogue accompanying the exhibition contains essays by David Humphrey and Keith Recker, and an excerpt from the novel Leash (Semiotext/MIT Press 2002) by Jane DeLynn.

In some paintings Kuharic juxtaposes various female types, like lesbian daddies, femme fatales and piteous nuns, to create a carnival of womanly magical realism. Linear narratives are sacrificed to a stream-of-conscious flux and a popping visual eye candy. Her worlds come alive with labor-intensive brush handling, collage effects and scrupulous color choices.

For her most recent paintings, as in Super Bowl Sunday, Kuharic applies what Humphrey calls her "Queer Populist Hallucinatory Realism" to the detritus of commodity culture. As Humphrey writes, "newness and desirability blossom ecstatically over the ruins" to "reroute a mass cultural narrative of objects, from a story of production-distribution-consumption to one of deviant transformation."

Katharine Kuharic currently lives in New York and in St. Louis, MO, where she is Assistant Professor of Painting at Washington University. For two years, in 2003 and 2004, she was the recipient of a Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. In 1999, 1990 and 1988 she was the recipient of awards from the Penny McCall Foundation, Art Matters, Inc., and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation respectively. Kuharic has been exhibiting her paintings in galleries nationally since 1983. THROB is her third exhibition at P•P•O•W.