Katherine Porter: Brilliance of Spontaneity Untamed

Over a remarkably distinguished career that spanned nearly six decades and with work in the permanent collections of more than forty important national and international museums, Katherine Porter stands as one of the great women of American Abstract Painting. She has produced bodies of work that demonstrate a diverse visual vocabulary consistently distinguished by their powerful sense of expressive authenticity and an enduring resolve that art should inherently maintain an integrative unity consistent with an artist’s aesthetic, social, political, and personal concerns.

Porter’s protean body of work with its unending varieties of compositions, colors, lines, shapes, and forms, has been described by the noted late art historian and Picasso scholar, Lydia Csato Gasman, as “the vast domain of spontaneity untamed.” It is from this supremely auspicious reverence paid to the painter that this exhibition derives its title. Professor Csato Gasman also noted about Porter that her extraordinary spontaneity and expressive volition is “tempered, subjected to rational control by a supreme act of self-critical concentration,” making the artist a veritable artworld paradox: a rare virtuoso of creative freedom blended with technical discipline that, in its unlikely combination, begins to explain her remarkable brilliance.