KIMBERLY TROWBRIDGE
FIELD AND FIGURE

J. Rinehart Gallery is delighted to announce the exhibition, Field and Figure, from artist Kimberly Trowbridge. Her exhibition, Field and Figure, approaches nature through the lens of Renaissance painting: the construction of characters interacting on a stage.

Field and Figure will be on view online and in the Gallery June 1 – June 26, 2024. A Preview Reception will be held Saturday, June 1, 2024, from 2-4pm. A Public Opening Reception will be held First Thursday, June 6, 2024, from 5-8pm. The artist will join us for a discussion about her work on Saturday, June 22, at 1:00pm

Within Field and Figure, Trowbridge combines color, shape, and rhythm to leap into the unknown, into the present relationships building on our surface. Field and Figure exists right in front of us, an observation of the figure as an invented construction.

Working plein air, Trowbridge unearths images that challenge perception and reveal structures describing the artist’s experience. The boundaries of the self are blurred and the connection to our environment is revealed as deeply intertwined.

Of her work, Trowbridge states: “Painting is a way of life, a continued effort to translate experience into a meaningful, visual document. Looking to the past gives us wonderful nuggets of wisdom, attitudes for entering, clues on the path through the deep forest of our own consciousness.”

Kimberly Trowbridge is a painter, an installation artist, a performer, and a lecturer on color theory. She received her MFA from the University of Washington (2006). Her first solo museum show at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (2021) was developed during her time as Creative Fellow at Bloedel Reserve (2018-2020), a 150-acre garden amid an old growth forest. She is a two-time Neddy Award Finalist (2014, 2016), and an Artist Trust GAP Grant recipient (2014). She is the Director of the Modern Color Atelier, a multi-year painting program at Gage Academy of Art, Seattle. Her work can be found in various private and public collections throughout the US, including Facebook (Meta), Microsoft Art Collection, and the King County Public Art Collection.

• ARTIST STATEMENT

  Field and Figure
  Exhibition Statement
  
  This exhibition is a culmination of field paintings, figure paintings, and sculptural forms I’ve developed over the past several years. It is an attempt to bring together multiple paths in my creative practice and to let them mingle and reveal my underlying interest in structural, poetic form.

  In each work I am engaged in the process of breaking-down and honing-in on the essential shapes, colors, and forms of my experience.

  My field works from Wyoming, the Mojave Desert, and Tieton, WA represent a shift in my palette, away from the deep and varied greens of the PNW. These works are a longing for distances, horizons, breath. These are primary documents— every mark is made directly on the field, a record of my sentient experience of color and form in a specific location. Painting in nature is a process of locating where I am. The distant hills reveal themselves as texts, the perfectly scaled blocks of color lined-up like letters or figures in an alphabet.

  The singular figure paintings here are painted in the liferoom, directly from the model. As an artist and educator, I value the rigorous process of translating my physical experience into optical form. Responding to a body in space through the organization of value, temperature, and intensity… it is a prismatic dance, a playing of chords.

  I began building my sculptural forms several years ago in the Mojave Desert. My forms are based on figures that appear in the classical paintings of the 17th century painter, Nicolas Poussin. My forms are essentialized gestures that respond to each other and can be rearranged as though on a stage, shifting meanings, rewriting the script.

  I love the formal language of art. I love deconstructing and isolating the parts of it in my own personal way and then rebuilding forms with the pared-down bones of my visual alphabet. I love the marriage of technical and narrative form, of materials and meanings. I love the history of art and its documentation of human consciousness.

  I am endlessly fascinated and inspired by the process of forming, building, and speaking through shapes of color.