The Fade: Kathryn Kampovsky

Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present The Fade, an exhibition of new paintings by Atlanta artist Kathryn Kampovsky, on view July 24 – September 12. Day by day, Kathryn Kampovsky traces interim moments before and after sleep. Exhaustion, rest, and surrender dissolve past and present alike as she plunges her subjects into a strangely precarious state of goodnight-kiss bliss.

Paintings often begin through forceful and unrestricted movements. By dragging improvised tools—strips of styrofoam, taped wall edges, and sponge gloves—across wet canvases, Kampovsky’s actions are propelled by her own exhalation. Built through accumulating layers of acrylic on canvas, broad swathes of pigment remain exposed beneath more recent refinements as earlier marks resurface through abrasive revision. The exertion required to produce the work appears embodied within figures that gradually surface, only to dissolve again as quickly as breath abandons the body. Pillows buckle beneath invisible pressures as reclining figures sink into mattresses and folds of fabric, held somewhere between rest and mortality. Flesh gathers and creases against itself through oxygenated reds, coagulated pinks, and bruised purples that waver in transparencies over figures drifting in and out of reverie.

The bedroom functions less as a domestic setting than a site where the body enters its nightly rehearsal with death. Drawing from film stills portraying actresses in moments of performative unconsciousness, Kampovsky’s paintings, somewhat subconsciously contend with the conventions of staging of ‘women in bed’ within visual culture, where female bodies are rarely permitted to exist free from projection. In these works, playing dead begins to resemble one of the only conceivable escapes from reality itself, even if only temporarily. Rest, here, becomes more than surrender; it offers a brief suspension from the expectations of performance through which contemporary life is so often organized.