Artist: Cathleen Clarke

Workplace presents A New Path, the first UK solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based painter Cathleen Clarke.

Exhibited through midsummer, the show brings together a new body of work that looks back to the Midwestern winters of Clarke’s childhood. Isolated figures surface from vast immersive landscapes of glowing, hallucinogenic colour, holding the viewer between observation and recollection.

Clarke’s paintings are shaped by a preoccupation with the fragmented nature of memory, in particular how certain fleeting moments can imprint themselves vividly in the mind, whilst others recede into obscurity. Her intuitive and spontaneous approach echoes this process, with forms concurrently emerging from and retreating into the pictorial plane with equal intensity. Her ethereal subjects appear faintly remembered, held together by the slippery materiality of the oil paint.

In these quiet crepuscular scenes the everyday sits alongside the surreal; A lone figure shovelling snow or the fleeting impression of a snow angel are counterpointed with a face mysteriously hovering in the flickering green glow of the aurora borealis. Presenting these vignettes together casts the ordinary in an otherworldly light.

Clarke’s work is presented alongside a newly commissioned text by New York based writer Alja Zoe Freier.