Katy Moran
Katy Moran's canvases often suggest the idyllic 18th-century paintings of Watteau and Fragonard blurred into dreaminess: their hazy smears of blue, green, pink and grey suggestive of silk, swings and summertime skies. If those colour-cued subjects aren't there, it's hard to see what is: Moran gets her images from Google, then inverts them for instant abstraction, suspending her painterly improv when a recognizable scene begins to bloom. The results are populated by phantoms, but nostalgia isn't Moran's bag: probing the points where binaries collapse into each other, her art queries the rationalities that underlie taste's thin divisions. It's also a magic trick, compounding demode approaches into lush quasi-abstracts that threaten to free-fall into kitsch but, disarmingly, never do.
Copyright Martin Herbert, Frieze Art Fair Yearbook 2007-8
Selected Bibliography
2007 'Top ten', Katy Moran, Artform, XLV, 6
2007 'Katy Moran', Martin Herbert, ArtReview, 9
2006 Katy Moran, Modern Art, London
2006 'Reviews: Matthew Monahan, Katy Moran', Martin Herbert, Time Out
2005 'London MA Graduates: Katy Moran', Charlotte Edwards, The Art Review 25
Selected Exhibitions
2007 Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco
2007 Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
2006 Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London
2006 'A Broken Arm', 303 Gallery, New York
2006 'New Contemporaries', Club Row, London; Coach Shed, Liverpool
Shown by
Stuart Shave/ Modern Art, London
