The Necessity of the Mark

The Necessity of the Mark 
Katherine Nemanich

Exhibit on view September 5 – October 5
*Reception Sunday, September 8, 3-6pm
*Artist Talk and Closing Reception Saturday, October 5, 2pm

Katherine Nemanich creates a 3-dimensional immersion in the painted mark—constructing and shaping her ink-painted papers to allow the energy of the marks to exist not only in 2-dimensional surfaces but beyond in 3-dimensional space. How the torn or curved papers, the constructed shapes and their shadows, and the tones and brush marks relate to their spatial environment is part of Nemanich’s ongoing inquiry into the nature of ambiguity in visual perception.

The installation celebrates the importance of writers, artists, and musicians in making their marks and the freedom to do so.

Bio:

Katherine Nemanich is a Chicago-based visual artist working with ink on paper to construct installations of paper sculptures that hang on the wall, sit on the floor, and suspend from the ceiling. She tears and combines her large calligraphic ink paintings to build three-dimensional constructions—bending, layering, and gluing the durable 100% cotton rag paper and fastening it in places with industrial elements of grommets, bolts, and wire. As part of her long quest to create expressionist painted marks as 3-dimensional form, she sets her marks free from the page for them to exist as physical entities.

“I choose to work on paper because of its long history as a means of recording human thoughts and ideas. With painted lines and constructed environments, I take the calligraphic hand drawn and gestural mark, as used in writing of every kind in every culture and language, and make it into a physical reality in order to communicate a new way of seeing, experiencing, and thinking about these drawn marks.”

Recent Chicago exhibitions include Line, Ink, Space, ARC Gallery; 6th Annual Competition, Bridgeport Art Center, where she was awarded Best 3-Dimensional Work, 2nd prize; Abstractly Speaking, Woman Made Gallery; Paper Arts: Two- and Three- Dimensional Works Exploring the Medium of Paper, Bridgeport Art Center; From the Center, Hyde Park Art Center. She was a participant and member of The Center Program at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2017. She is a member of the critique group Dialogue Chicago. Her work has been reviewed in publications including Newcity Chicago. Nemanich is an alumna of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago, College of Architecture and Art. http://Katherinenemanich.com