LewAllen Galleries is pleased to present Katherine Porter: works on paper, an exhibition of mixed media and oils on paper by the acclaimed artist Katherine Porter (1941–2024). Opening Friday, February 27, 2026, the exhibition highlights Porter’s extraordinary ability to channel the complexities, discords, and dissonances of her times into powerful aesthetic statements.

As noted art scholar Irving Sandler once wrote that Jackson Pollock invented chaos, it can also be said that Katherine Porter took that chaos and, through a remarkable capacity for creative spontaneity, transformed it into brilliance. These works demonstrate a muscular engagement with chaos as a foil for the harmony she imagined—and longed for—in the world at large. On paper, the fray is conducted with a discernible diminuendo, when compared to Porter’s large canvases, but continue to use signature “Porter” marks—swirling vortexes, vibrating scribbles, and jousting colors.Porter’s work was deeply informed by the social consciousness of the 1960s through the 1980s, including the Vietnam War and racial conflicts. Her art became a cri de coeur, or cry of the heart, for a better world. She saw her work as visual poetry, in league with the poets of engagement she admired, such as Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca. By harnessing the rupturing mayhem of the era, Porter repurposed it through her brilliant sense of aesthetics to seek a sense of equilibrium in a world of imbalance.

Despite its moral imperative and social consciousness, Porter’s work maintained its sophisticated and refined aesthetic power. The chromatic exuberance on her paper works stands in stark contrast to the turbulent motivations driving them. This creates a body of work that holds its own alongside masters like Hofmann, de Kooning, and Mitchell. As Picasso scholar Lydia Casato Gasman observed, Porter’s “vast domain of spontaneity untamed” was remarkably well “tempered, subjected to rational control by a supreme act of self-critical concentration.”

The brilliance of Porter’s legacy lies in this mindful control. She approached the facture of her work with the eye of a designer, anchoring her spontaneity with rigorous compositional control. Through the dialectic between her powerful image-making and the rigor of her pictorial process, there emerges a rare convergence of aesthetic beauty and the “sanctity in the truth of the tragedies” that inspired it.

Born in Danville, Virginia, Katherine Porter was educated at Colorado College and Boston University. Her work is included in the permanent collections of many of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among numerous others.