Have you ever longed for someone so much, so deeply that you thought you would die? That your heart would just stop beating? I am longing now, but for whom I don't know.

(Tracey Emin)

Katy Pinke's approach to artmaking is a delicate encapsulation of longing: for something beyond what we can see, or think we know. Through a dizzying panoply of media and methodologies encompassing storytelling, image-making, and gesture-marking, Pinke reaches out to humanity and the potentials just past its grasp. Partly whispering within the post-neoexpressionist vocabulary of Tracey Emin, partly dancing in the ghostly shadows of Basquiat, her paintings are not only an extension of her multidisciplinary gesamtkunstwerk of songwriting and narrative theatrical installation; they are a manifestation of her identity as a storyteller unwilling to settle for the limited home of words.

Pinke's works across painting, drawing, sculpture, video, installation, and performance, alongside her parallel practices as a singer-songwriter and actor, are the epitome of high-risk, high-reward.

Her visual work combines oil, acrylic, watercolor, ink, pastel, and sculptural materials; abstract and linguistic marks collide with images of people, animals, birds, and objects to transmit light through dream states, alternate realities, and nonlinear time. Movement, instinct, and improvisation guide the work, tracing the circuit between mind and body as a form of speech. Twombly and Basquiat as lineage; Hilma af Klint as spiritual compass; Calder's circus in a dance with Debuffet's objects: all of these hopes crystallize in hope)is standing st.ar, Pinke's debut solo exhibition at Kate Oh Gallery.

Twelve large-scale paintings; papier-mâché and LED bird sculptures; a stop-motion drawing video; and a suspended line of sculptural asemic text: here, extended pictorial space becomes voice; line becomes storytelling; and sensation becomes communication.

(Text by Benji Su Alexander)