Philip Martin Gallery is pleased to present, Built from line, a solo exhibition of new works by Berlin-based artist Katy Cowan. This special exhibition of Cowan's work is co-hosted by Berlin gallery Haverkampf Leistenschneider, and takes place at their Charlottenburg space July 4 - 19, 2025, alongside a group presentation of new and never-before-seen works by Kwame Brathwaite, Carl Cheng, Tomory Dodge, Sky Glabush, Laurie Nye, Sophie Treppendahl and Sung Jik Yang.

Katy Cowan uses sources and materials in unexpected ways. We intuitively and immediately understand the results of her artistic practice, but somehow cannot predict them as they rise out of the act of both her and us thinking about things anew. “I am completely interested in breaking down barriers of categorization,” she writes. Katy Cowan notes that her medium-defying, hand-painted, cast wall-mounted sculptures draw on a variety of experiences, be it where she lives, where she works, or what she thinks about on a given day, all of which is grist for the mill for a practice that attends to alteration, repetition, and a conceptual emphasis on material choice.

This past spring Katy Cowan was invited to work at Berlin's renowned German art foundry Skulpturengießerei Knaak, which has worked with such figures as Katharina Grosse, Jonathan Meese and David Zink Yi. To the foundry Cowan brought a variety of everyday objects, such as masking tape, cardboard sheets, and paint palettes (complete with the kind of paint squeezes, scrapes and blobs that result on a palette from days working in the studio). These objects were cast via the lost wax technique; in their transformation, a range of information - from the grain of the cardboard to the lines of the tape - not to mention all the looping and bending lines and volumes of the paint squeezes, scraps and blobs - was cast in low-relief aluminum. Katy Cowan then hand-painted these low relief sculptures, applying across their textures and volumes strokes of bright oil paint that move the eye via color jumps of hue, value, temperature and intensity.

Are we looking at a painting, or a sculpture? An image, or an object? Perhaps all of the above. These are the kinds of interests Cowan shares with an artist like Jasper Johns. "Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it,” Johns wrote in a sketchbook in 1964. Katy Cowan embraces an open attitude towards studio practice, noting, “I love incorporating accidents into my work and learning to react to them, to build off of them.” Cowan's body, studio tools and the events in her immediate environment serve as generative subject-matter for her artworks. These artworks investigate human experience and the traces left by such experience. They suggest that ideas and objects are both physical and metaphorical; and that an impression can take forms both indexically literal – like a metal cast – and expressively iconic -- like a drawing. Katy Cowan moves easily between media, inviting us to think carefully about the ways in which the materials of art and life figure externally our interior experience.