Katherine Porter

American, 1941–2024

Birth placeCedar Rapids, Iowa, United States

Death placeSanta Fe, New Mexico, United States

BiographyKATHERINE PORTER (1941–2024)
By News Desk, https://www.artforum.com/news/katherine-porter-dies-19412024-554300/

[Photo] - Katherine Porter in her studio, Belfast, ME, ca. 1987. Photo: Katherine Porter/LewAllen Galleries.

Painter Katherine Porter, whose massive, bright, and cacophonous canvases evince a highly personal expressionism, died at her home in Santa Fe on April 22 at the age of eighty-two. Santa Fe’s LewAllen Galleries, which represents her, said the cause was a heart attack. Porter over the course of a peripatetic career drew on sources as disparate as abstraction, tantric art, and the Mexican muralists to create bold works that often seemed to physically vibrate with energy. “My paintings are about chaos, constant changes, opposites, clashes, big movements in nature. . . . History, natural things, short wars,” she told Art in America in 1982. “I try to put everything into a picture. What you see is what you come up against in the world.”

Katherine Louanne Pavlis was born on September 11, 1941, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She was raised alongside her two siblings by her mother and stepfather after her father was killed in World War II. Having been encouraged in art by her high school teachers, who took note of her early talent, she enrolled in Colorado College, from which she graduated in 1963 after studying under painter Bernard Arnest and, during a junior year spent at Boston University, Conger Metcalf and Walter Murch. In 1962, she married sculptor Stephen Porter, the son of noted nature photographer Eliot Porter. She traveled widely with her husband, and during the span of their marriage the couple visited a number of South American countries, where she gained an enduring interest in the political and social conflict that rived the continent in the ’60s.

Following the dissolution of her marriage in 1967, Porter returned to Boston, where she taught art while continuing to pursue her own practice, immersing herself in the city’s artistic community. In 1972, she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and moved to New Mexico. The move was to be just one of many she made over the ensuing years, which saw her live in Belfast, Maine; Montreal; and Rhinebeck, New York, among other environs. Porter’s appetite for variety was reflected in the dizzying surfaces of her work, which increasingly garnered public notice after her first solo shows, in 1971, and her first sale, of a painting that went to renowned dealer Betty Parsons that same year.

Though working alongside a cohort who included Louise Fishman, Suzan Frecon, Mary Heilmann, Elizabeth Murray, and Pat Steir, Porter stood out for the crackling charge of her large-scale canvases, across which danced lines, spheres, swirls, and various hard-angled shapes, appearing to spill from above or float around one another. “Her paintings have a theatrical quality and the rough gaiety of big dogs,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in a 1979 issue of Artforum. “They are also manically sophisticated, as if a lifetime’s education were being regurgitated all at once.”

Porter was gifted in infusing forms that by nature ought to be emotionless—a triangle, a cube—with feeling: A shape conjuring a sense of featherlightness in one canvas might evoke a lugubrious heft in another, with such stark contrasts often occurring within a single work. As well, her paintings frequently commented on social and political circumstances and events, not directly, but in terms of the ripples they cast out into the wider world.

“It is not that she envisions a world undergoing relentless and unavoidable cataclysms,” wrote John Yau in a 2002 exhibition catalogue. “It is that she recognizes that change and conflict are central features of reality, which otherwise don´t repeat itself. Her paintings are not pictures, but the manifesting and tracing of forces both visible and invisible. They are visionary revelations of the idea that transformation is integral to both presence and reality. And, as everyone knows, destruction, change and rebirth lie at the heart of transformation.”

Porter was awarded honorary doctorates from Maine’s Colby College and Bowdoin College. Her work is held in the collections of major arts institutions around the world including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Detroit Art Institute; the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Houston Museum of Fine Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Gemeentsmuseum of the Hague; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; and the Tel Aviv Museum, Jerusalem.

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