Morton Fine Art is pleased to present Strange Country, Strange Times, a solo exhibition of paintings and prints by the artist Katherine Hattam. Incorporating literary and art-historical elements into her work, Hattam’s interiors offer materialist explorations of ultimately psychic space. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Strange Country, Strange Times will be on view through December 20, 2022 at Morton Fine Art’s Washington, D.C. space.
The Pinch, 2022, 30 x 22 in. – Jigsaw woodblock print on paper – Edition 14/15Strange Country, 2022, 30 x 22 in. – Jigsaw woodblock print on paper – Edition 4/5
Curatorial Statement by Amy Morton:
Katherine Hattam is an internationally-renowned artist and recent finalist for Australia’s prestigious Archibald Prize. We have worked together for over a decade, so it is a great honor to be able to share so much of her incredible artwork in one exhibition, made even more special by the fact that Strange Country, Strange Times is Hattam’s first U.S. solo exhibit at Morton Fine Art and first ever solo exhibition in the U.S.
Hattam’s work is unmistakable. Brightly shaded walls and windows, collaged book spines and iconographic depictions of native Australian fauna and flora make up much of her painterly practice – a lifelong investigation with the domestic interior as its focus. She incorporates literary and art-historical elements, focusing on materialist explorations of ultimately psychic space. Acknowledging a centuries-long preoccupation with domestic space as both the imaginative location and societal bounds of female artistic production, Hattam conjures doubly imbued sites of domestic labor and imaginative longing, full of totemic kitchen tables and charged dining-room chairs. Although uniquely Australian, Hattam’s canon inspires and relates within a global feminist dialogue.
A Strange Country, 2022, 49 x 60.5 in. – Mixed media on linenPerhaps, 2022, 21.5 x 25.5 in – Mixed media on linen
Artist Statement – by Katherine Hattam:
A painter and printmaker, my practice encompasses works on paper, collages and straightforward oil on linen. Since my mother—a great reader—died, I began to often incorporate books into my work, repurposing them to make a grid as the support in my paper or linen pieces.
The genesis of this exhibition, Strange Country, Strange Times, was the time of Covid and lockdowns. I created six new works during this period, stretching from 2020 to 2021. As an artist with my studio out the back of my house, I was fortunate in being able to work from my studio and—more than that—to revel in the time lockdowns opened up.
I found myself reflecting on the physical and geographic nature of my country, the islandness of Australia. Initially, this relative isolation protected us against the spread of the virus, but not for long. Nevertheless, it did make very clear what a strange island and what strange times that period was and is.
My Blue Pantheon, 2022, 30 x 23 in. – Oil on lineLove From, 2022, 11 x 13 in. – Mixed media on linenWomen’s Estate, 2022, 29 x 19 in. – Mixed media on linenThis Strange Island, 2022, 31 x 23 in. – Mixed media on linen
Katherine Hattam, This Strange Island, 2022. 16.5 x 12 in. Mixed media on linen Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist.
Morton Fine Art is presents “Strange Country, Strange Times,” a solo exhibition of paintings and prints by the artist Katherine Hattam. Incorporating literary and art-historical elements into her work, Hattam’s interiors offer materialist explorations of ultimately psychic space. The artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., “Strange Country, Strange Times” will be on view from November 16 – December 20, 2022, at Morton Fine Art’s Washington, D.C. space.
Brightly shaded walls and windows, collaged book spines and iconographic depictions of native Australian fauna and flora make up much of Hattam’s painterly practice, a lifelong investigation with the domestic interior as its focus. Acknowledging a centuries-long preoccupation with domestic space as both the imaginative site and societal bounds of female artistic production, Hattam’s totemic kitchen tables and charged dining-room chairs recur as motifs throughout her artistic practice, doubly imbued as locations of domestic labor and sites of imaginative longing.
Often, windows look out onto fantastic landscapes – a rueful rumination on experiences proffered but withheld. In “Strange Country, Strange Times,” the vibrancy of Hattam’s window-views infiltrates into the domestic interior, reflecting the seeping isolation of the recent pandemic years, when means of travel and discovery were often confined to the mind. Hattam was well-equipped for such conditions: her domestic spaces have always been inveterately imaginative, expanded by (and often literally constructed from) the pages and covers of the books she’s been reading. Her frank pastiche of passing literary and artistic influences onto these interior landscapes discloses the extent to which Hattam views the perception of space as an inherently psychological construction, with internal influences and personal histories governing the way we make sense of even the most familiar room.
In 2019, Hattam received a fellowship grant to study at the Australian Print Workshop undermaster printer Martin King, where she began learning the method of jigsaw woodcut printing, a technique of classical Japanese art that was later adopted by Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. Several works in this exhibition were first made at that workshop in the months immediately preceding the pandemic. One of this show’s title works, Strange Country, sets Australian animal life in a landscape originally taken from Giotto. Reflecting on these portentous prints, Hattam notes that the pandemic allowed her to recognize the isolation implicit to living in Australia, a condition of being which she has often imposed into her art.
Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), another woodblock print, is inserted regularly throughout Hattam’s work here, alternately as window views or paintings-within-paintings, and represents for the artists a mentality of time – waves of feminism, waves of coronavirus – that embraces natural rhythms based on a sense of tidal flow.
A longstanding image for Hattam is that of a wood-backed dining room chair, which the artist has drawn and even reconstructed as sculpture since the 1990s. The persistence of chairs, tables and books stand in for family members and personal influences, like portraits in absentia. Despite the inveterate cerebrality of her interior compositions, Hattam insists that her works are always “about actually being there: they exist because someone has been there to see it.”
Her furniture, despite its symbolically potency and personal resonance, is also steadfastly literal, and represents a window into the broader material world. Through her compositions, Hattam asks: How much of one’s daily life is a mixture of what’s going on in your head and what’s going on outside?
About the Artist
Katherine Hattam (b. 1950) is a Melbourne-based Australian artist. Literature was a passion for Hattam’s mother, who first read Freud in adolescence, later passing her appreciation down to her daughter. Hattam graduated from Melbourne University in 1974 with a BA in Literature and Politics and a focus on psychoanalytic theory.
Literary references abound in her work; some of the books used in her compositions derive from her mother’s extensive collection, while others are scoured from second-hand stores. Works on paper – drawing, printmaking and collage – are a continuing thread in her practice.
Hattam’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, Artbank, Heide, Art Gallery of South Australia, Deakin and La Trobe Universities, Warrnambool Art Gallery and Bendigo Art Gallery. In 1992 she was awarded an MFA by the Victorian College of the Arts, and in 2004 she was awarded a PhD by Deakin University.
She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2011.
Morton Fine Art
Morton Fine Art Founded in 2010 in Washington D.C. by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice.
Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
November 16, 2022 – December 20, 2022 Morton Fine Art: 52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC 20001
Brightly shaded walls and windows, collaged book spines, and iconographic depictions of Australian fauna and flora make up much of Hattam’s painterly practice, a lifelong investigation of the domestic interior. Here, she reflects on psychic space at the hands of the pandemic’s seeping isolation through vivid jigsaw woodcut printing, a technique of Classical Japanese art that was later adopted by Edvard Munch and Paul Gaugin. Inserted regularly throughout the works are motifs of Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa, representing a mentality of time—waves of feminism, waves of coronavirus—that embraces natural rhythms based on a sense of tidal flow.
Katherine Hattam A Strange Country, 2022 49 x 60.5 in. Mixed media on linen Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
Washington, D.C. – Morton Fine Art is pleased to present Strange Country, Strange Times, a solo exhibition of paintings and prints by the artist Katherine Hattam. Incorporating literary and art-historical elements into her work, Hattam’s interiors offer materialist explorations of ultimately psychic space. The artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., Strange Country, Strange Times will be on view from November 16 – December 20, 2022 at Morton Fine Art’s Washington, D.C. space.
Katherine Hattam Perhaps, 2022 21.5 x 25.5 in Mixed media on linen Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
Brightly shaded walls and windows, collaged book spines and iconographic depictions of native Australian fauna and flora make up much of Hattam’s painterly practice, a lifelong investigation with the domestic interior as its focus. Acknowledging a centuries-long preoccupation with domestic space as both the imaginative site and societal bounds of female artistic production, Hattam’s totemic kitchen tables and charged dining-room chairs recur as motifs throughout her artistic practice, doubly imbued as locations of domestic labor and sites of imaginative longing. Often, windows look out onto fantastic landscapes – a rueful rumination on experiences proffered but withheld.
In Strange Country, Strange Times, the vibrancy of Hattam’s window-views infiltrates into the domestic interior, reflecting the seeping isolation of the recent pandemic years, when means of travel and discovery were often confined to the mind. Hattam was well-equipped for such conditions: her domestic spaces have always been inveterately imaginative, expanded by (and often literally constructed from) the pages and covers of the books she’s been reading. Her frank pastiche of passing literary and artistic influences onto these interior landscapes discloses the extent to which Hattam views the perception of space as an inherently psychological construction, with internal influences and personal histories governing the way we make sense of even the most familiar room.
Katherine Hattam The Pinch, 2022 30 x 22 in. Jigsaw woodblock print on paper Edition 14/15 Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
In 2019, Hattam received a fellowship grant to study at the Australian Print Workshop under master printer Martin King, where she began learning the method of jigsaw woodcut printing, a technique of classical Japanese art that was later adopted by Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. Several works in this exhibition were first made at that workshop in the months immediately preceding the pandemic. One of this show’s title works, Strange Country, sets Australian animal life in a landscape originally taken from Giotto. Reflecting on these portentous prints, Hattam notes that the pandemic allowed her to recognize the isolation implicit to living in Australia, a condition of being which she has often imposed into her art. Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831), another woodblock print, is insterted regularly throughout Hattam’s work here, alternately as window views or paintings-within-paintings, and represents for the artists a mentality of time – waves of feminism, waves of coronavirus – that embraces natural rhythms based on a sense of tidal flow.
A longstanding image for Hattam is that of a wood-backed dining room chair, which the artist has drawn and even reconstructed as sculpture since the 1990s. The persistence of chairs, tables and books stand in for family members and personal influences, like portraits in absentia. Despite the inveterate cerebrality of her interior compositions, Hattam insists that her works are always “about actually being there: they exist because someone has been there to see it.” Her furniture, despite its symbolically potency and personal resonance, is also steadfastly literal, and represents a window into the broader material world. Through her compositions, Hattam asks: How much of one’s daily life is a mixture of what’s going on in your head and what’s going on outside?
Katherine Hattam headshot Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist. Photo credit: Clare Rae
Katherine Hattam (b. 1950) is a Melbourne-based Australian artist. Literature was a passion for Hattam’s mother, who first read Freud in adolescence, later passing her appreciation down to her daughter. Hattam graduated from Melbourne University in 1974 with a BA in Literature and Politics and a focus on psychoanalytic theory. Literary references abound in her work; some of the books used in her compositions derive from her mother’s extensive collection, while others are scoured from second-hand stores. Works on paper – drawing, printmaking and collage – are a continuing thread in her practice. Hattam’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, Artbank, Heide, Art Gallery of South Australia, Deakin and La Trobe Universities, Warrnambool Art Gallery and Bendigo Art Gallery. In 1992 she was awarded an MFA by the Victorian College of the Arts, and in 2004 she was awarded a PhD by Deakin University. She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2011.
Katherine Hattam This Strange Island, 2022 31 x 23 in. Mixed media on linen Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington D.C. by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.
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Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 
