Katinka Mann: Geometry and the Organism

I would characterize my response to Katinka Mann's work in the following way: One, her work is simple, yet complex.  Its contradictions are a reflection of how things exist in a world today.  Two, she puts color in the space between form and expressions which becomes increasingly apparent the more we look at her work.  Three, her art is not about representation in the everyday sense, but about another turn of the mind that looks at the world as a kind of visual force.  Katinka Mann is an artist with perpetual curiosity.

She works with biomorphic forms.  The material is aluminum and is covered in industrial paint.  The cut wedges (rhomboids) in her work occasionally reveal the wall behind them.  At other times, they are fixed on top of other shapes, which appear as unicellular forms, as amoebas.  In this case, the rhomboid gives us a second color in contrast to the first.

In one of her green shapes, the rhomboid is cut through and slanted on the surface.  This appears to energize the shape.  Mann's works function as sculptural reliefs.  In each case, the space of the wall enters into the work and becomes part of our visual experience.  Her point of reference is somewhere between shape, space, and color.  Her obtuse rhomboidal shapes take us on a journey unveiling the mysterious force we call life.  Some would refer to this as content or affect, but the kind of meaning one searches for in these sculptural reliefs has its own origins.

As an artist, Katinka Mann is searching, and therefore her work is very much alive.  I find these shapes extraordinary.  Her work offers the viewer a fixed point between unicellular nature and architectonic culture derived from the human mind.  The colors and contrasting shapes open doors of wonder.  In addition, they offer a sense of place and the opportunity to reflect on geometry as integral to the organic functions of everyday life.

Review: Carter Burden Gallery, New York, NY, Colors, Robert C. Morgan, 9/2016

Waves of Light

It never makes itself vast. And so becomes utterly vast.

 As a young painter of landscapes in the 1950s, Katinka Mann was enchanted by dramatic effects of light and shadow, of the sun and the moon, of the gleam of melting snow on the surface of a lake. The work this adventurous and multifaceted artist has produced over six decades is predominantly abstract, and the Tao has steadily become central to her creative life and everyday outlook. On the underlying continuity of her approach to form, Mann told me, “I haven’t gone so far from being a landscape painter, because Tao is based in Nature.” 

Working in collage in the early 1960s led her into abstraction in the mid-60s, and by the 1970s she was making eccentrically shaped, all-white paintings. To understand the effect of light as it washed over these works, in 1982 she made 24-by-20-inch Polaroid photographs of them using colored gels. In the following decade, these Polaroids were repurposed for the Photography Cutouts series, relief sculptures that push the pellucid chroma and glossy surfaces of the prints into the third dimension by way of bellying forms and bulging contours. 

“In 1996, everything became rounded,” Mann says, “except the trapezoid.” That bit of angular geometry, present in the work since 1964, is “a mantra or mandala” that she uses to this day to invoke the infinite, and the most prominent element of a personal abstract symbolism that emerged from the artist’s profound admiration of Taoism. The procedural complexity of the work from this period does nothing to diminish its startling immediacy, and Mann hopes that viewers “develop their own sense of perception and awareness and intuitiveness. They develop a broader way of seeing and come to a oneness within themselves.”

Works in the Aluminum series, which dates from 2010–2012, somewhat resemble the Photographic Cutouts in form and substitute a soft metallic sheen for spectral color.  Enamel-painted canvas lines them, and a tiny fringe of this material often is visible around the periphery. The contrast between the delicate canvas threads and the solid aluminum surface is one of many instances of Mann’s belief, derived from the Tao, in the unity of opposites. 

Indeed, it’s not difficult to infer the interplay of yin and yang in Mann’s work. The Flattened Sculptural Paintings, begun in 2013, are rich with binary relationships. These colorful painted aluminum works are designed by hand, cut by laser. Smoothly swooping outlines emphasize the trapezoid’s angularity; reflective and often sparkly surfaces of the larger shape contrast with the matte surface of the trapezoid (or, in some pieces, with a trapezoid-shaped cut-out). These paintings are starkly elegant but not austere; emotionally affecting even though cleanly fabricated; formally succinct while conceptually expansive; gently humorous yet full of grace. 

But such an exercise of enumerating paradoxes in Mann’s paintings is inadequate as an explanation of the visceral excitement of looking this recent work. It creates its own context apart from and independent of any literary or philosophical sources, however inspirational those may be to this artist.  There is nothing equivocal about its clarity, individuality and visual impact. Buoyant in effect, this work wears lightly Mann’s aspiration to deal with fundamental, foundational belief, and the viewer is borne along. 

The epigraph is from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by David Hinton (NY: Counterpoint, 2000)

Review: Gallery Max, SoHo, New York, NY, Stephen Maine, “Moving Through Stellar Space”, 9/2019