Katy Kirbach born Arkansas, USA, 1986

Katy lives and works in London. She is currently studying at the Royal Academy of Arts. She has sold to private collections in the UK, USA, Japan, Switzerland, and Israel. Recent exhibits include Ascension, London, 2008 and Black Deco, a solo show at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, 2009.

Katy Kirbach is an exhibiting artist with Simon Oldfield Gallery

• Premiums 2010 - 5th - 14th February 2010 Royal Academy of Arts, Sackler Wing, London
• Black Deco - Solo Show - July 2009 The Slade School of Fine Art, Gower Street, London
• First Cut - December 2008 The Jago, 77 Redchurch Street, London
• Ascension - Four London Artists - October 2008 Simon Oldfield Gallery, The House of St Barnabas, Soho Square, London
• Slade School Of Fine Art Degree Show - May 2008 The Slade School of Fine Art, Gower Street, London
• Essay on Katy Kirbach by Elizabeth Day Katy Kirbach sees her work as an optical illusion: a dialogue between the artist and the object that constantly shifts in form, and creates different sensations when viewed from different angles.
  
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Katy Kirbach sees her work as an optical illusion: a dialogue between the artist and the object that constantly shifts in form, and creates different sensations when viewed from different angles.

At first glance, her paintings are simple, repetitive geometric works, often rendered in psychedlic colours. But it is only when up close to the canvas, that the viewer can see how each pattern breaks down into a textured mass of drips, marks and impasto brushstrokes.

This duality is at the core of Kirbach’s work. Heavily influenced by the pattern and craft movement in 1970s America, she makes a point of overworking the canvas, of making the artist’s presence felt in every intricate chalk-line or clump of exuberant paint.

From a distance, Kirbach’s paintings strike the viewer as a rigidly patterned surface, a forest of geometric forms repeated ad infinitum. It is only when we step closer that we can notice the scored horizontal lines that disrupt the algebraic purity or the thick nodules of paint sticking up at random from the surface. The homogeneity of the grid is thus broken-up by the artist’s own hand. The canvas is no longer purely decorative.

Kirbach cites a writer, Anais Nin, as a major influence. ‘Nin was famous for cutting and pasting segments of one novel into the next as different mutations of the same theme. She often overarticulates, overdescribes and her sentences run on long after they should have stopped. In my art, I have that same desire to overdo something, to step beyond a point that is immediately pleasing.’

Kirbach, 23, was born in the USA and grew up in the small town of Fairfield, Iowa until coming to study at the Slade School of Fine Arts in 2004. She says that the Midwestern landscape — vast tracts of land that, on closer inspection, consist of several thousand rows of corn — has also impacted on her work. ‘A lot of my paintings end up feeling quite claustrophobic,’ she says. ‘That’s the trouble with photographing them — you don’t get a sense of the size or the texture.’

Kirbach is currently studying at the Royal Academy of Arts. She has sold to private collections in the UK, Switzerland, Israel, Japan and America. Selected exhibitions include Ascension, London, 2008; Open Studio, London, 2009; Black Deco, Slade School of Fine Arts, 2009.

Open Studio, 2009, was a sell out show with all four paintings entering a single corporate collection. Following Black Deco, 2009, Kirbach was selected to provide the cover image for the Royal Academy Christmas card, 2009.

Elizabeth Day, feature writer for The Observer