MiArt, 2023

KATHLEEN GONCHAROV

Fire Below

Allianz MiCo, Milan Italy

April 14 - 16, 2023

Booth E44

Olympia is proud to present Fire Below, a solo presentation of works on panel and canvas by Kathleen Goncharov. Until her inaugural exhibition that took place in 2022 at Olympia, Goncharov’s long and dedicated art practice was a private one compared to her public and rich 40-year career as a curator of contemporary and modern art. In these decades, only close friends were aware of her studio practice. 

Goncharov was initially inspired to make work after falling in love with Late Gothic and Early Renaissance painting during trips to Italy beginning in the mid-1980s. Her language of a feathered touch, rich palette, and the recurring nature of her abstract forms give shape to a feeling of romance towards the art seen on Italian soil. The images evoke the sensuality of silk, entwined movement, and the undulating hills of the terrain. Though enigmatic, they are amorous. The pictures can be read as environments and also ruminations on the pleasures of looking. Materially, she honors the delicacy of egg tempera and gold leaf through colored pencil, which also preserves marks and requires slow layering to create vividness in color. 

Rather than affiliating with any recent visual tendency, Goncharov points to the influence of artists such as Giotto, Duccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesco, Masaccio, and especially the eccentric forms and colors of the Sienese painters such as Giovanni di Paolo, Sassetta, Master of the Osservanza, Sano di Pietro, and others, as her central inspirations.  Goncharov abstracts their forms to bring their oeuvre into an unknown place. Goncharov has returned regularly to Italy as both artist and curator, most notably as US Commissioner to the 50th Venice Biennale. 

Though first prompted by those images of the Early Renaissance, Kathleen Goncharov’s work reveals her private obsessions. Separated from any epic, religious history, and moral allegory, her subject becomes the seductive atmosphere, touch and color that only whispers in those historic paintings.

Kathleen Goncharov is Senior Curator at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. She served as US Commissioner to the 50th Venice Biennale where she curated an exhibition by Fred Wilson for the American pavilion. She has also organized international exhibitions in Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, Bologna, Venice, and Rome, as well as numerous exhibitions and projects in the US. She was Public Art Curator at the List Visual Art Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she oversaw the Institute’s Percent-for Art Program; Executive Director of Rutgers University’s Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions artist-in-residence program, and Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum at Duke University. For fourteen years she served as Curator of the University Art Collection at The New School in New York City where she built a major art collection and organized public programs for the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.