It’s that time of year, when just about everyone is looking to do some last-minute holiday shopping—and we at the Artnet Gallery Network think art is just the thing. Between sculptures, photography, and paintings from galleries from Berlin to New York, you’ll be sure to fall in love with one of these distinctive pieces.
We’ve gathered here 10 affordable artworks, all under $3,500, from the Artnet Gallery Network that will make the perfect gift—whether for yourself or someone close to you. And this is only a small selection of the extensive range of art and artists that you too can explore from home through the Artnet Gallery Network. We regularly publish shortlists of artists we are currently watching or art that’s caught our eye, so make sure to watch for our next roundup in 2023!
Katherine Hattam, The Pinch (2021). $1,200. Courtesy of Morton Fine Art, Washington, DC.
Australian artist Katherine Hattam (b. 1950) uses feminist art history as a starting point for her practice, touching on themes, motifs, and symbols of contemporary feminist discourse. Frequently portraying landscapes and interior views, she commingles the psychological, internal world with the external, physical one. The results are vibrant compositions that add a sense of the mythical to the everyday.
Gallerist Amy Morton, owner of Morton Fine Art, Washington, DC. Courtesy of Amy Morton. Photo: Jarrett Hendrix.
Gallerist and curator Amy Morton is the founder and owner of Morton Fine Art, a stalwart fixture of the Washington, D.C., art scene. Recognized for its diverse roster of national and international artists, Morton Fine Art—and by extension, Morton herself—has developed a reputation for its thought-provoking exhibition program, and a specific emphasis on art and artists of the African and Global Diaspora. Morton Fine Art has also shown a strong commitment to exhibiting female artists, and the gallery’s current presentation is a solo show of work by Katherine Hattam, which is on view through December 20, 2022.
Morton has cultivated strong relationships both with the artists she represents (refusing hierarchy and referring to them as her partners) and collectors, for whom she strives to craft an accessible and educational experience. The result has been Morton Fine Art’s ability to consistently place museum-quality contemporary art in both private and public collections for over a decade.
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We recently spoke with Morton to talk about establishing her gallery, the current exhibition, and what’s to come in 2023.
You founded Morton Fine Art in 2010. Can you tell us about your background and what led you to open the gallery? What first drew your interest to the arts?
I come from a line of under-recognized female artists on both sides of my family. My parents, although divorced, both exposed my sister and I to performing arts, music, and other cultural mediums when we were children. The occasional trip to view a museum exhibition was always a big deal in our household. My mom and I used to create drawings together at the kitchen table—what I always considered a continuing story between mother and daughter. All that noted, I didn’t know I was destined for a career in the arts until high school: I walked into an art history class and was changed. I took my first gallery job when I was 17. By the time I graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles at 21, I had interned and worked at auction houses on both coasts, at art galleries local and national, and for a renowned New England artist association. Oddly, at that juncture, I had not yet found my niche in the art world, and it finally felt right when I opened my own gallery in 2010. With Morton Fine Art, I could amplify original artistic voices that I feel are simultaneously timeless and timely, substantive and layered.
Since the opening of the gallery, what are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned? Do you have any advice for young gallerists just starting out?
I’ve learned many lessons and believe I will continue to for the foreseeable future. Agility has been my best posture, and I would advise young gallerists to consider the same. There is still space to do things differently, and it is important not to get lost comparing or measuring yourself against other galleries or business models.
What are some of your guiding principles as a gallerist? How is this reflected in the artists you represent and exhibitions you show?
I often joke that I am allergic to hierarchy. I believe that empowerment through education and a comfortable environment are wonderful tools of connection and understanding. Visual art is a natural way to advance conversations and ideas, and I strive to provide a gallery environment that sometimes feels more like a salon—a place that supports exploration, emotional honesty, and growth, and doesn’t enhance insecurity. My artist partners are technically masterful in their respective mediums and integrate lasting conceptual and philosophical elements that activate the imagination. Washington, D.C., is an international city, and it follows that my gallery’s programming spans many global conversations, including social justice, environmental justice, reconciliation, and personal themes.
The art world has undergone a number of transformations since 2010. Have you noticed any trends or have any predictions, good or bad, that you find particularly interesting or significant?
It will continue to be an interesting time ahead. As a Washington, D.C.-based gallery, our pulse is always intertwined with politics—local, national, and international—and therefore the art created here is remarkably relevant. I love this aspect of the city, as there is always more to learn and contend with. Increased collector confidence in online browsing and acquisitions has also been an asset for us “secondary city” gallerists. While not a global trend yet, I have long wished for a more energized focus and interest in Washington, D.C.’s art community and all we offer.
Katherine Hattam, The Great American Novel (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art.
Morton Fine Art is currently showing “Katherine Hattam: Strange Country, Strange Times,” which is on view through December 20, 2022. Can you tell us about the show?
Katherine Hattam is a well-established Australian artist having her first U.S. solo here at Morton Fine Art. We have worked together for over a decade, so it is a great honor to share so much of her incredible artwork in one exhibition.
As an artist, Hattam incorporates literary and art-historical elements in her work, focusing on materialist explorations of ultimately psychic space. Her practice is a lifelong investigation into domestic interiors: brightly shaded walls and windows, collaged book spines, and iconographic depictions of native Australian flora and fauna make up much of Hattam’s 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, doubly imbued as locations of domestic labor and sites of longing.
For the current exhibition, Hattam has also included several spectacular prints—some of them jigsaw woodblock prints—that she created from 2000 to 2021.
Katherine Hattam, A Strange Country (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art.
With New Year’s just around the corner, what are you looking forward to in 2023? Are there any forthcoming exhibitions or other gallery plans that you can share?
2023 is going to be another great year! Morton Fine Art will have solo exhibitions with Jenny Wu (born in China; lives and works in Hartford), Vonn Cummings Sumner (born in San Francisco; based in Los Angeles), Meron Engida (born in Ethiopia; based in Washington, D.C.), Andrei Petrov (born and based in New York), Maliza Kiasuwa (born in Bucharest of European and African descent; lives and works in Nairobi), Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann (Washington, D.C.-based), Amber Robles-Gordon (born in Puerto Rico; based in Washington, D.C.), Hannelie Coetzee (born in South Africa; based in Johannesburg), Hiromitsu Kuroo (born in Japan; lives and works in Iruma, Japan) and Prina Shah (born in Kenya; lives and works in Nairobi), as well as a group exhibition focusing on the medium of collage.
If you were not a gallerist, what would you be doing?
Excellent question and one that I have entertained a few brief times in my career. Nothing else ever screamed out at me, so I would guess a preschool/elementary school educator, or advocate for a niche of sustainable living.
Learn more about Morton Fine Art’s exhibition program here. Follow Artnet News on Facebook
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.
Katherine Hattam November 16 – December 20, 2022 Morton Fine Art’s 52 O St NW #302 Washington, DC 20001
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 The Great American Novel, 2022 12 x 17 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.
Katherine Hattam My Blue Pantheon, 2022 30 x 23 in. Oil on linen Courtesy Morton Fine Art and the artist
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.
“Katherine Hattam’s work sees the terrain of language as a wilder and more intimate place. This is not a home or a homeland, it is a landscape that belongs to itself. Perhaps it belongs to no one, but lives as all beings live, against the possibility of being owned by another…”
-Dr. Anne Norton
Stacey and Henry Jackson President’s Distinguished Professor of Political ScienceUniversity of Pennsylvania, USA
Selected Collections include:
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, VIC
Ian Potter, Melbourne University, VIC
Bendigo Art Gallery, VIC
Warrnambool Art Gallery, VIC
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, QLD
Mornington Art Gallery, VIC
Grafton City Art Gallery, NSW
National Bank of Australia
Potter Warburg Collection
Hummerston Clark Collection
Bankers Trust Collection
Smorgon Collection
Queen Victoria Hospital Collection
George Patterson Collection
The Darling Foundation
Box Hill City Art Gallery, QLD
Hamilton City Gallery, VIC
Minter Ellison Collection
Artbank
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, VIC
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, NSW
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, VIC
Art Gallery of SA, Adelaide, SA
RACV Collection
University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD
LaTrobe University (LUMA), VIC
“Anger and Tenderness”, 2020, 19″x25″, mixed media collage
“A Woman’s Work is Never Done”, 2020, 17″x21″, mixed media collage
“Fly Away”, 2020, 15″x19″, mixed media collage
“Kangaroo Side On”, 2020, 17″x15″, mixed media collage
The black swan of trespass, by Katherine Hattam; oil on linen, 217cm x 155cm (framed), $17,500; Artwork Photograph by Clare Rae.CREDIT:
Her thing. Colourful paintings incorporating collage and considerable word-play.
Our take.Katherine Hattam has spent her life in and around the Melbourne art scene. Her father, Hal Hattam, was the art world’s obstetrician of choice and a talented amateur painter. Katherine has been exhibiting regularly since the late 1980s, and lately her son, William MacKinnon, has made a name for himself as an artist.
In The Landscape of Language, Hattam’s third solo exhibition at Arthouse, she continues to use old paperbacks as collage in her larger paintings. The book titles invite us to look for meanings that may or may not exist, beyond whatever memories they conjure up in the artist’s mind. Hattam favours old Penguins that would have disintegrated by now anyway.
In terms of colour, and the riotous Australiana that runs through these canvases, this is one of her boldest outings. Hattam’s swans may be black but her kangaroos can be bright blue or pink.
Her subjects range from domestic still lifes to allegorical landscapes. On the way, she pauses to consider the attempts by the First Fleet’s William Dawes to learn the Eora language; environmental issues (symbolised by Hokusai’s menacing wave); and a favourite picture by American master Philip Guston.
In a painting called Pantheon (1973), Guston wrote a list of the artists he most revered. Hattam has undertaken a feminist revision, replacing Guston’s all-male list with a female cast. As statements go, it’s more playful than strident.
Can I afford it? For a well-established artist, Hattam’s prices are very affordable. The most expensive picture in this exhibition is the oil painting, The black swan of trespass (pictured above, 217cm x 155cm), at $17,500. This would equal her existing record price. There are 12 works selling for the low price of $2200. This includes small oil paintings such as Pink kangaroo, Swans dream phthalo, and The friendship garden (each 43cm x 31cm).
Where can I have a squiz? Arthouse Gallery, 66 McLachlan Avenue, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney,
until March 28; arthousegallery.com.au.
AND stateside at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC USA.
Artwork by: OSI AUDU, JULIA MAE BANCROFT, ROSEMARY FEIT COVEY, NATALIE CHEUNG, NATHANIEL DONNETT, VICTOR EKPUK, KATHERINE HATTAM, NATE LEWIS, ANDREI PETROV, MARIO ANDRES ROBINSON, and VONN SUMNER
Spring 2019 Survey of Select Morton Fine Art Artists
March 6 – March 30th, 2019
Opening Reception
Friday, March 8th from 6-8pm
EXHIBITION LOCATION
Gallery B
7700 Wisconsin Ave, Ste E
Bethesda, MD 20814
HOURS
Wednesday – Saturday 12pm – 6pm
Want to view artwork in DC? Come by our permanent gallery space:
Morton Fine Art
52 O St NW #302
Washington, DC 20001
Hours: Wed – Sat 12pm-5pm and Sun-Tues by appointment
Please also view our exhibition “Starshine and Clay” featuring the artwork of KESHA BRUCE, MAYA FREELON and AMBER ROBLES-GORDON at Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA through March 31st, 2019.
Workhouse Arts Center
2nd Floor – McGuireWoods Gallery
9518 Workhouse Road
Lorton, VA 22079
Hours: Wed – Sat 11am-6pm, Sunday 12pm-5pm
About Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC, 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 anyone can become an art collector or enthusiast, 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.
Redefining the traditional gallery model, Morton Fine Art (MFA) replaces a single gallery space with two locations: MFA’s permanent fine art gallery space and *a pop-up project, a temporary mobile art galleryof curated group shows. Morton Fine Art established it’s trademark, *a pop-up project, in 2010.
BY 
By 
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 
