Catherine Repko:a new season’s dawning

Huxley-Parlour is pleased to present London-based artist Catherine Repko’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, a new season’s dawning. The exhibition consists of a group of new large-scale canvases developed over the past year, exploring social rituals and symbolic moments of change and transition.

Rendered in Repko’s distinct restrained and muted palette, this latest body of work continues the artist’s interest in memory, ancestry and nostalgia. Repko’s compositions depict entanglements of figures at human-scale, fingers intertwined and bodies coalescing, each rendered in shades of ochre, terracotta and indigo. The figures seem at once connected to each other and yet isolated, each submerged in thick and visceral negative space. The female figures become proxies or symbolic ciphers for, or perhaps even phantoms of, sororal relationships.

Emptied of almost all reference points, the bodies in Repko’s paintings are articulated in minimal silhouette. The singular ear, however, has become a recurring motif in Repko’s work, and is woven throughout the canvases of a new season’s dawning. In otherwise featureless figures, the ear remains – shell-like – a talisman of remembrance replete with anticipation of intimacy.

In this new body of work, Repko has returned once again to mixing powdered marble dust with her oil paint. The resulting surfaces appear densely textural, recalling the faded, stone-like surface of a fresco. In this exhibition, Repko simultaneously withholds and reveals, working to solidify the slippery surfaces of memory and make tangible the ephemeral nature of time, space and human connection.