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Brush Fire (2020). Courtesy of Kohn Gallery.
Los Angeles-based, Dallas-born artist Kate Barbee creates expressive, wildly colorful large-scale paintings filled with tumbling human figures amid domestic settings. To make her works, Barbee often starts out drawing onto the canvas on her studio floor. The works end with Barbee sometimes sewing patches of fabric or discarded canvases onto the new works. Barbee’s latest works, “Feral Floral,” are currently on view with Kohn Gallery and were made entirely during the pandemic. Here, the tangles of her figures’ forms are interspersed with houseplants, ceramics, and the various nicknacks of a home. At times, the works capture the energy of the German Expressionist, other times the dreaminess of Marc Chagall’s atmospheric scenes, but are filled with a very contemporary sense of longing.