Examining the paintings of Katherine Spindler is like looking into deep waters. One has the sense that things are moving just beneath and beyond the surface, too vast to fully perceive or understand. With a quiet immensity and arresting gravitas, Spindler’s work sees light and shadow flicker and evade, swirl in eddies, swell and recede. The surface of the canvas, like water, is unstable, constantly shifting and undulating while maintaining a meditative stillness that both captivates and mystifies. Indeed, this unlikely marriage of movement and stillness, of tumult and quietude, is a defining characteristic of Spindler’s oeuvre, and elicits a similar mix of emotion in the viewer. Often blurring, veiling, or erasing the images she works with, Spindler’s intention is to evoke rather than explicate, to suggest more than to prescribe. Calling for intimacy, stasis, and reflection, the artist draws the viewer into heady moments of lucidity and unexpected sensuousness.  

Spindler completed both her BA(FA) (2004) and MFA (2011) with distinction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where she also lectures part time in drawing and printmaking. Her distinguished Masters exhibition, At Sea, drew upon her experience volunteering aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia, and went on to show at Commune.1 in Cape Town. She joined Barnard Gallery in 2014 and in August 2015 presented Selah, hersecond solo exhibition, and her first with the gallery. Selected group exhibitions to date include Future / Present (Barnard Gallery, 2016); Picture and Paper (Barnard Gallery, 2015); Surface: Emerging Painters (Barnard Gallery, 2015); Then & Now: Conversations in Time (Barnard Gallery, 2015) Seeking Eden (Casa Labia Museum, 2014); Paint Matters (Barnard Gallery, 2014); Muse (Casa Labia Museum, 2013) and Cross-Currents, (David Krut Projects, 2012). Barnard Gallery represented her work at the Cape Town Art Fair in 2015 and 2016.

Katherine Spindler will be artist in residence on the island of Sylt in September 2016. She will also spend two weeks at the Künstlerhaus Meinersen.

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