On the occasion of Kate Sable’s solo exhibition, Could I Have Been Just Anyone, at Pazo Fine Arts in Kensington, MD

I first encountered Kate Sable’s paintings in her graduate program as she was formulating her graphic language of abstraction.   Her luscious canvases pulled referentially from architecture – softened out of its right angles - repeating patterns, and weighty, wavering forms that clashed unapologetically off their background hues.  Bold and bright, the work was elegant, and charismatic with a paint application that emphasized the surface of the canvas and a flattened, stylized embrace of the picture plane. 

In the years since, the work and the person have both matured and become more complex with lived experience and a continuous dedication to artistic practice.  As a mother and partner, nuanced and intimate relationships and a shifting sense of self became integral subject matter to investigate and make room for. Over time, the flattened space and exterior references both gave way to the internal and personal; patterned expanses folded in, or lifted up, to reveal portals into deeper space and an intermingling of psychological and observed forms. 

 During a hiatus from exhibiting her work, Kate invested in her studio practice, exerting her physical and meditative energy into larger works that demand a full range of motion from her petite frame.  A labor of creation, her work has taken on the mirrored corporeal quality of a vessel, containing a wealth of personal metaphor, narrative, intuition, and emotion within the epic behemoths at the center of her compositions.  Drawing an unexpected line between viscera and décor, the coiffed, bodily arrangements hold their geometry loosely, oozing and dripping through their organizational structure, never letting us forget their materiality.  Thin, radiant nets pulse through pockets of illusionistic depth, haloing them in an activated tangle of tensions and limits.  Dissatisfied with tidiness, Kate interjects problems to work around, letting the composition tuck and unravel.  At times, she gives into the impulse to refine, while elsewhere refuses to make polite edits to gravity-bound paint streams, enhancing a sense of liquidity and movement. 

 Confidently, Kate digs into her feminine perspective while utilizing palette, dramatic breadth of scale, and varied paint handling to question perceptions of gender. Defiant and imposing, this series is the artist’s antithesis to any notions of creative restriction or inhibition suffered by mothers in the art world.  In these new works, we are treated to a compromise between order and flexibility, nothing truly tethered or fixed to its depicted place.  Lattices, webs and props simultaneously support and give way to the sag and swell of amorphous masses, undulating to invite imperfection and breaks in anticipated repetition.  Our eyes sink in and climb out as they read the visual information and absorb humor, chutzpa, worry, and anger expressed and resolved in emphatic brushstrokes and layered washes. Kate’s paintings “contain” as much as they “give,” and evince a balance between coy mystery and self-discovery.  They offer a glimpse into a sacredly selfish realm.  

--ALEX EBSTEIN