Katharine Kuharic is an American artist known for multi-layered representational paintings that combine allegory, humor, social critique, and aspects of Pop and pastoral art.Arning, Bill. "Katharine Kuharic, 'Show Quality Bitches,'" Time Out (New York), May 15–22, 1997. p. 46.Levin, Kim. "Katharine Kuharic," The Village Voice, June 9–15, 2004. p. 85.Bonetti, David. "The World Brought Low," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 3, 2005. Her art typically employs painstaking brushwork, high-keyed, almost hallucinogenic color, discontinuities of scale, and compositions packed with a profusion of hyper-real detail, figures and associations."Katharine Kuharic, 'Pound of Flesh,'" Time Out (New York), March 15, 2012.Kandel, Susan. "30 Artists Take Aim at Masculinity," Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1992. Retrieved April 7, 2022.Humphrey, David. "Hyperbolic Realism," Katharine Kuharic: Throb, New York, NY: PPOW, 2004. Retrieved April 6, 2022. She has investigated themes including queer sexual and political identity, American excess and suburban culture, social mores, the body and death.Russell, Christopher. "Studio Visits – New York: Katharine Kuharic," Artillery, May/June 2011. Retrieved April 6, 2022.Green, Andrea. "Katharine Kuharic: The World Brought Low," Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Retrieved April 7, 2022. Artist-critic David Humphrey called Kuharic "a visionary misuser" who reconfigures disparate elements into a "Queer Populist Hallucinatory Realism" of socially charged image-sentences that shake out ideologies from "the congealed facts of contemporary culture" and celebrate the possibility of an alternative order.
Kuharic has been recognized with awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, New York Foundation for the Arts, and San Francisco Art Institute, among others.MacDowell. Katharine Kuharic, Artists. Retrieved April 6, 2022.Carnegie Mellon University. "Notable Alumni." Retrieved April 8, 2022.San Francisco Art Institute. "Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow," Programs. Retrieved April 6, 2022. She has shown internationally, and her work belongs to the public collections of the St. Louis Art MuseumSt. Louis Art Museum. Super Bowl Sunday, Collection. Retrieved April 7, 2022. and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Priestess, Katharine Kuharic, Collection. Retrieved April 6, 2022.Hellberg, Susanna. "Stockholms Tip Set," Dag DN (Sweden), 1998.Frackiewicz, Dorota. "Dzikie Wisne Kultura Popularna W Tworczosci Katharine Kuharic," Sztukaifilozofia, 2007. She lives in New York and is a professor of art at Hamilton College.Hamilton College. Katharine Kuharic, Faculty. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
Education and career Kuharic was born in South Bend, Indiana in 1962. She completed a BFA in painting and drawing at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984 and then moved to New York City, where she studied at the School of Visual Arts with Louise Bourgeois and Robert Storr. In the decade that followed, she exhibited at New York venues including Hallwalls, White Columns, Drawing Center, Four Walls, and P.P.O.W., where she had a solo show in 1994.Sax, George. A Realistic Look at American Culture," The Buffalo News, February 10, 1989.Hallwalls. Katharine Kuharic, Artists. Retrieved April 7, 2022.Gordon, Kate. Katharine Kuharic: Working in the Lou, St. Louis, MO: Bruno David Gallery, 2012. She has continued to show at P.P.O.W., with six subsequent solo exhibitions between 1997 and 2016.Cascone, Sarah. "7 Extraordinary Artworks to Seek Out at the Newly Returned ADAA Art Show in New York," Artnet, November 4, 2021. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
In the early 2000s, Kuharic returned to the Midwest, relocating to St. Louis for a teaching position at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.Foster, Holly. "Eight Hamilton Faculty Members Awarded Tenure," Hamilton College, News, March 10, 2009. Retrieved April 6, 2022. Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, The Delaware Contemporary, and South Bend Museum of Art, and appeared in group shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art, among others.Dischinger, Mark. "Superfantastic Four," Riverfront Times, March 16–22, 2005. p. 29.Gillespie, Evan. "Harsh and Amiable," South Bend Tribune, April 1, 2007.
Kuharic has taught art since the mid-1990s, at institutions including Yale School of Art, The New School, the School of Visual Arts, and Washington University (2002–6), where she served as a lecturer, associate professor and coordinator of painting.Washington University. "Faculty promotions, appointments, tenure granted," News. Faculty. April 4, 2007. Retrieved April 8, 2022. She has been a professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York since 2007.
Work Kuharic's paintings been described variously as surreal,Cotter, Holland. "Peep Show," The New York Times, July 10, 1998, p. E37. Retrieved April 6, 2022. magic realist, and "hyperbolic realist." She employs complex, labor-intensive techniques; these include the collaging, drawing, re-collaging and re-drawing of appropriated imagery (before hand-transferring compositions onto canvas) and an old-master-like painting process in which she renders images tonally before applying discrete layers of color.Myers, Terry R. "The Payback of Painting Can Be a Beautiful Thing," Katharine Kuharic: Pound of Flesh New York, NY: PPOW, 2011. Retrieved April 6, 2022.Headlands Center for the Arts. Katharine Kuharic, Artists. Retrieved April 6, 2022. Writer Terry R. Myers suggested that Kuharic shares with painter Lari Pittman an interest in the power of popular culture and its complex relationship to queer sexual and political identity. Her tableaux of juxtaposed, loaded imagery yield proliferating strings of ideas, jokes and interpretations—often in a picture-puzzle or rebus-like manner—that viewers must complete; writer Keith Recker wrote that Kuharic's webs of images and paint handling engender a "frightening, essential tug of war" teetering "between happiness and despair, love and death, safety and risk."Recker, Keith. Katharine Kuharic: Throb, New York, NY: PPOW, 2004. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
Earlier painting (1986–99) Kuharic's early work explored the body and sexual desire, social mores and grief through imagery of animals, anatomy and nature, death heads and female figures.Cotter, Holland. "Nature Fabrilis," The New York Times, July 3, 1992, p. C26. Retrieved April 6, 2022.New York Magazine. "Dottie Attie/Katharine Kuharic," April 18, 1994. Reviews described this work as built-up layers of visual information "rendered with a kind of Pre-Raphaelite hyper-clarity," which pushed the limits of perception to create a kind of "a hallucinatory, multicolored static." Her early paintings often depicted predatory domestic animals—cats and dogs, frequently bulldogs—as in Food Chain (1989) or Long Wait (1990), in which a staring cat hunched over a bird's nest full of eggs. New York Times critic Holland Cotter characterized them as strange, small works "painted in tight colored lines that look like a kind of jittery embroidery," suggesting a "cross between children's-book illustrations and bad-trip psychedelia."
In the 1990s, Kuharic turned to more personal, sometimes macabre, imagery of the body, symbolic objects and female figures occasionally configured in timelines representing sexual partners.New York Magazine. "Katharine Kuharic," May 5, 1997. In a 1992 Los Angeles Times review, critic Susan Kandel described one such set of watercolors as a Utopian, "jewel-like vision of a world of women, free not just of men, but of the gaze of men" and charged with energy and empowerment. Later, minutely detailed works depicted women with flayed or heavily tattooed flesh, featured in fraught scenarios or guises and placed alongside iconic figures of femininity (e.g., Priestess, 1996; Backwards Flags, 1998).Goldberg, Vicki. "1890s or 1900s, the Visions Are of an Apocalypse Soon," The New York Times, May 14, 1995, Sect, 2, p. 33. Retrieved April 6, 2022. The surreal work, Mister Rogers (1996), was dominated by a central young woman covered with tattoos, who is encircled by a second figure rendered in cutaways of tissue, bones and entrails and surrounded by small female figures: a debutante, a dominatrix, nuns and Eastern religious devotees, and a trapeze artist among them; another painting depicted a bare-breasted woman decked in pearls with red and blue worms teeming from the sockets of her skull.
Time Out critic Bill Arning described the paintings in Kuharic's exhibition, "Show Quality Bitches" (P.P.O.W., 1997), as "bizarre, theatrical tableaux" and "lesbian theme parks" with the heightened quality of opera, which juxtaposed sometimes-frightening female figures and caricatures of social constructions of the feminine against luscious monochromatic backgrounds. Mind's Eye depicted a disembodied eye set against a blood-red background that looms over barely postpubescent girl in a cowgirl hat; she was surrounded by a fashion model, a Bettie Page-type dominatrix, a jester, and a doll of an infant among others.
Later painting (2000– )
In the 2000s, Kuharic shifted toward more socio-politically focused work using found (or what she termed "unsolicited") imagery appropriated from local newspapers and magazines, slick-printed flyers, and junk mail. She reconfigured the imagery into packed paintings examining American overabundance, consumerism, and boom-and-bust real estate and financial markets, taking a tone that was simultaneously critical, celebratory and surreal.Miller, Sarah Bryan. "Bruno David unveils new exhibits at his gallery," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 20, 2012. Retrieved April 6, 2022. For example, Super Bowl Sunday (2003) consisted of seven mandala- or flower-forms composed of sparkling, fanned-out products (Gatorade and beer bottles, shoes, cans of produce, meat) that hovered like spacecraft in a blue sky over a devastated, rubble-strewn landscape depicting a bombed out, tiled bathroom and tangle of twisted pipes. It drew on Kuharic's memories of the chaos of leaving her downtown New York studio following 9/11 and relocating to St. Louis. Village Voice critic Kim Levin described that work and others in Kuharic's show "Throb" (P.P.O.W., 2004) as "zonked heartland imagery of burgers, fries, flags, Super Bowl stuff, and corn as high as an elephant’s eye" relating to "our country’s current bad trip."
Kuharic targeted middle-class suburban culture, McMansions and Midwestern stereotypes in subsequent exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis ("The World Brought Low", 2005) and Bruno David Gallery ("Working in the Lou," 2012).ArtDaily. "Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Extends Exhibitions," June 23, 2005. Retrieved April 6, 2022. The former show included Jack's Originals (2004), a restaging of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden that portrays a casually dressed, middle-aged group atop jerry-built scaffolding made of potato chip bags, cheeseburgers, plates of club sandwiches, hams and other goods; a giant sun composed of a central frozen pizza package and plastic detergent bottles hovers above them. Critic Jessica Baran described works in the latter show, such as Ladue News (2010), as "big-box surrealist nightmares-as-paintings."Baran, Jessica. "At the Galleries," Riverfront Times, April 19, 2012. That painting depicted affluent groupings (culled from society magazines) ascending towards an expanding, sphincter-like mandala of product containers that seems to threaten the ramshackle building in which they are placed.Ladue News. " Ladue Lips," April 26, 2012. Retrieved April 7, 2022.