Katherine Blackburne

Katherine Blackburne was born in London, raised in Australia and is now based in New York City. 

Blackburne’s work turns upon the cultural and symbolic burden placed on images of women, mothers, and bodies in states of care, desire, performance, or transformation. Drawing from the history of figurative painting and religious iconography, her paintings engage tropes of domesticity, spectacle, and unease. Cropped bodies, compressed spaces, saturated color, and theatrical composition produce scenes suspended between narrative and dream, intimacy and exposure, tenderness and violence. In her recent paintings, the figure is placed within staged scenes of artificial leisure. Inflatable animals, pool toys, foliage, and fragments of landscape recur as unstable motifs: playful, artificial, seductive, and faintly threatening. These objects create a world in which pleasure is never entirely separate from danger, and beauty is inseparable from vulnerability.  

Blackburne received an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has taught drawing and painting at Columbia University and has served as a visiting artist at the School of Visual Arts.  

Blackburne has exhibited widely, her solo exhibitions include The Flooding Lake at Rusha & Co., Los Angeles, as well as earlier solo presentations in New York, Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, Australia. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Half Gallery, New York, The Painting Center, New York; the Frost Art Museum, Miami; Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York; SVA Gallery, New York. Her work has been featured in major international art fairs including Art Basel Miami, SCOPE, and the Dublin Biennial. Her paintings are held in private collections across Europe, the United States, and Australia.