LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its representation of the work of Katherine Porter (b. 1941) and to present its first exhibition of her paintings entitled “Brilliance of Spontaneity Untamed”. The thirty-five works included in this current exhibition are primarily from the last twenty-six years and make abundantly clear Porter’s superb capacity to bring powerful compositions and rich colorations to her canvases.

Over a remarkably distinguished career that spans 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.

Katherine Porter was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1941. She received her B.A. degree from Colorado College in 1963 and also studied at Boston University. Porter received an honorary doctorate from Colby College in 1982 and an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin College in Maine in 1992.

Her paintings have received wide art world validation from inclusion in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions in major galleries and museums around the world, including having been exhibited twice in the Whitney Biennial, representation with solo exhibitions at the Knoedler Gallery in London, the Nina Nielsen Gallery in Boston, and the Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, Andre Emmerich and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tel Aviv Museum in Jerusalem, Israel, among many others.

Porter is recognized for the combinations of colors, geometries and symbols she uses to comprise her compositions: circles, triangles, rectangles, squares interposed with lines, spirals, arcs, scaffolds, and matrices all of which coalesce on her surfaces to emanate an unmistakable aura of spirited force and generative energy. These elements combine to produce a charismatic beauty that emanates from their complex authenticity for which she is known.

There is an entropic, sometimes cacophonous synergy of disparate visual elements evident in the works included in this exhibition that unequivocally resonate the vitality of direct artistic feeling. These characteristics are Porter’s signature ones that make the works in this exhibition “unmistakably Katherine Porter.”