Houldsworth is pleased to present new paintings by the young London-based painter Katie Pratt. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art, she has contributed to major exhibitions in Los Angeles, Grenoble and London. This will be her first solo exhibition at Houldsworth Fine Art.
In her new body of paintings, Katie Pratt brings an unusually contemplative spirit to the language of expressive, abstract art. Her pictures appear like details of a larger scheme, the ground of swiftly brushed colour expanding ever outwards, overlaid with new webs of graphic detail. Thin, threading lines describe the edges of her brushstrokes, others draw out the contours of accidental splashes, and everywhere drips are stretched out and dramatised. Her colour undergoes the same minute contortions, with singing greens and high-pitched neons replacing the older more organic shades.
Sacha Craddock has described her pictures as being like maps: they have the same quiet attention to detail, the same accumulation of small marks built up into meaning. Yet they must also be understood as a commentary on the most theatrical traditions within abstract painting. After a brief return to images in the 1980s, painters are once again beginning to understand the expressive potential of abstract form and invest it with new meanings. Pratt is one who has contemplated this heritage and done so with the sensibility of a new era. Her world is not the tragic arena of the post-war years, yet her work, whilst being wildly rococo, can suggest anxiety and taut emotion. It can also be satirical, parodic and most sharply comic.
