Cadogan Gallery is delighted to announce Blinds, Kim Bartelt's new exhibition at Cadogan Solo, Milan. Committed to and challenged by the physical reality of painting - the flatness of the material support, its textural consistency, its given monochromatic tonality - Bartelt's work implements an interruption onto the surface, slicing the picture field into an expanding web of patches which are then pasted and stitched back together. Bartelt unravels the criss-cross configuration of the canvas' linen, and at the same time, reties it, making the movement from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality (and the other way around) into a theme, a figure.
Drawing on the language of geometric abstraction, Bartelt's work mediates on the ephemerality of our world and the hidden connections of contemporary human experience. Her use of a consciously restrained visual vocabulary, consisting of squares and rectangles, harnesses complex emotional states into seemingly controlled, harmonious compositions. Creating canvases that may at first appear solitary and silent, through contemplative engagement, reveal a pulsing inner landscape that captures the often fragile connection between the seen and the unseen, the permanent and transient.
