“Water Ribbon” by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is a vertical composition that’s 7½ feet high. (Morton Fine Art)“Arch 3″ by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann has a strong central focus that departs from the artist’s usual style. (Morton Fine Art)
…Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann is the most conventional of the five participants, at least in her choice of media. The Washington artist paints, usually on paper and often on a mammoth scale, with acrylic pigment and sumi ink. The ink links Mann’s style to historical Chinese painting, as does her nature imagery. Yet the crowded, layered pictures are mostly abstract. Mann begins by pouring pigment to make random patterns, which are then amended and extrapolated, partly by collage.
That synthesis — of flowing and improvisational with hard-edged and precise — yields tableaux that are dynamic and distinctive. The two Mann panoramas in “Empirical Evidence” — the larger almost 12 feet wide — are among the show’s highlights.
Anyone smitten with these sweeping pictures can easily find more, if not quite so expansive, examples at Morton Fine Art. The biggest offering is the title piece, “Water Ribbon,” a rare vertical composition that’s 7½ feet high. Many of the other pictures are, unusually for Mann, square or nearly so. Although they still suggest landscapes, such pictures as “Arch 3” have a stronger central focus than is typical of the artist’s style. Rather than meander every which way, Mann’s latest water ribbons coalesce into dazzling wholes.
ANDREI PETROV, Moonlit Poem, 2020, 10″x20″, acrylic & watercolor on canvas
About Sanctuaries
Internationally recognized for his incredible nature based abstract paintings in oil, Andrei explores expansive and airy seascapes, a wonderful breath of fresh air during these times of confinement. The scale of these beautiful paintings reflects the adjustment from his large Brooklyn studio (where he oftentimes creates large works on canvas) to more intimate works created from his home studio in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Each piece has distinct brushwork, depth and layering, and palette which is distinctly and unmistakably from Andrei’s hand.
ANDREI PETROV, For Years to Come, 2017, 30″x48″, oil on canvas
ANDREI PETROV, Splashdown, 2020, 14″x19″, acrylic & watercolor on canvas
ANDREI PETROV’s Obscured Source and Secure Location installed
About ANDREI PETROV
Based in New York City ANDREI PETROV explores memory in his organic abstract paintings. His paintings probe the distortion, incompleteness and rare moments of clarity in the shadows of memory. Each piece portrays the intrinsic struggle and selective inclusion or exclusion of details in the process of recollection. At times, sharpness occurs in the rear of the picture plane while the out of focus, obscured areas, exist in a larger scale toward the foreground and make reference to the inscrutable nature of long and short term memory.
PETROV’s paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in prestigious collections and can be viewed at The Four Seasons Hotel in both Washington, DC and Punta Mita, Mexico, The Fairmont Hotel in Chicago and The Conrad Hotel, Miami. His paintings have also had cameos in the following films, The Royal Tenenbaums, Autumn in New York, Kate and Leopold, The Business of Strangers and Words and Lyrics. He is the featured visual artist 2016 for Music@Menlo.
Sanctuaries marks ANDREI PETROV’s seventh solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art.
About Morton Fine Art
Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC 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.
Morton Fine Art
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Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann’s art starts with an act of chaos, an act of chance — and then seeks to impose order around it. Her work invites people to take their shoes off and step into another world. Funded by Adobe, One Window is an experimental documentary short that seeks to use the creative methods behind Katherine’s own art to produce a film about it. By the end of the film, viewers won’t have any trouble seeing how a seventy foot-long abstract mural is a work of detailed self-portraiture about one of the most extraordinary artists of our time.
Director & Producer: Rob Shore
Executive Producer: Eric Philpott (Adobe)
DP: Shane Alcock
Editor: Matt Tanski
Sound Design & Music: Joe Basile
Location Sound: Phil Edfors
Colorist: Robbie Carmen
Assistant Camera: Camille Toussaint
Katherine Mann’s mural “Small Planet” in the HUB-Robeson Center on Sunday, Jan. 12, 2020.
Lindsey Toomer
The HUB-Robeson Center will look more colorful this semester as the HUB Galleries commissioned Katherine Mann to create a new mural for the space.
Mann, an independent artist and Washington, D.C. local, prepared a few potential pieces for selection for the HUB’s newest mural. A work entitled “Small Planet” was chosen, and she worked on the collage elements of the piece throughout the semester in her studio.
“This piece was chosen, I think, because it combined free floating, verdant and textured painting technique with fluid dynamics, maximalism and an interest in the local landscape,” Mann said via email. “Each of the flowers, leaves or branches in the mural is a depiction of a plant or tree that is endemic to Pennsylvania and the region directly around State College.”
Plants scattered throughout the mural include magnolias, fringe trees, tupelos, redbuds, dogwoods and maple leaves, along with other twigs and flowers native to Central Pennsylvania.
“I wanted to take details from the daily scenery of the region – mostly, tree leaves – and use them to populate a fantastic, immersive and imaginary world,” Mann said.
Along with paying attention to the State College landscape, Mann said the mural holds personal significance to her.
“The mural represents, to me, a joyful celebration of the mess of matter that make up the world around us,” Mann said. “The local maple tree on the meridian in the middle of the street might not be given a second glance, but recontextualized into this kaleidoscopic landscape it becomes alien, invites a new appreciation.”
Installed during the final week of the fall 2019 semester, Mann signed the mural with 15 minutes left to spare before the HUB closed for holiday break.
Curator of HUB-Robeson Galleries Lindsey Landfried said she hopes the piece not only touches the Penn State community, but those who visit, as well.
Katherine Mann’s mural “Small Planet” in the HUB-Robeson Center on Sunday, Jan. 12.
Lindsey Toomer
“The HUB-Robeson Center commissioned this work by Katherine Mann to share high quality contemporary art with our students in the spaces they work and engage in during their Penn State experience,” Landfried said via email. “This artwork enriches the University community and its visitors by deepening a sense of place and the experience of space, stimulating viewer curiosity and wellness and ensuring that art engages the educational, cultural and historical dimensions of our environments.”
Landfried praised the mural for being “rich, complex and dynamically and visually arresting” and hopes each student resonates with artwork in their own way.
“We anticipate that students will each have their own response to its physical presence and transformative potential,” Landfried said. “The HUB-Robeson Center is a cultural destination at Penn State, and we activate the arts here in the Union to address today’s complex questions and serve local and global communities through access to the arts.”
Campus Arts Associate Tamryn McDermott helped Mann carefully install and hammer the mural, alongside HUB Galleries staff and student interns.
“Katherine was wonderful to work with,” McDermott said via email. “While we nailed, Katherine added more layers of paper and paint to the mural to integrate her work into the architecture and surrounding space.”
According to McDermott, students would stop by the mural throughout finals week to watch the installation process and ask about the piece. Students thought it added energy to the space.
“One student told us how grateful she was that we were installing the mural for the students to enjoy,” McDermott said. “Another brought up something she learned in one of her psychology classes. She said she learned that plants help to increase productivity.”
McDermott added that the HUB team is looking forward to the student body “seeing new things within the dense and layered surface over time” and enjoying the mural.
SNP selects Katherine Mann for Artist-in-Residence program
Published Sunday, Aug. 11, 2019, 5:01 pm
SNP selects Katherine Mann for Artist-in-Residence program
Shenandoah National Park has tapped Katherine Mann as the August Artist-in-Residence.
In her sweeping abstract paintings, Mann merges traditional Chinese and Japanese ink painting techniques with an approach rooted in Western abstractionism. Mann received her Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College for the Art. She has attended many other residencies including at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Mann’s residency will run through August 19, 2019. Park visitors are invited to join Mann for painting demonstrations on Thursday, August 15 between 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. at Skyland (mile 41.7 and 42.5 on Skyline Drive) on the outside terrace located between the registration office and dining room. On Sunday, August 18, the demonstration will be at the Dickey Ridge Visitor Center (mile 4.6 on Skyline Drive) between 10:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. The public presentations are free and suitable for visitors of all ages, however, there is a $30-per-vehicle entrance fee to the park which is good for seven days or use a valid Annual or Lifetime Pass.
Shenandoah National Park is a jewel among National Park Service sites and offers a distinctive array of natural, cultural, and recreational opportunities for visitors. The Artist-in-Residence program is established in numerous National Park Service sites to inspire artists to create and share art that not only motivates and encourages millions of people to visit and explore, but also helps build awareness and develop stewardship of these beautiful public lands.
“We are pleased to select an abstract painter for our Artist-in Residence Program,” Superintendent Jennifer Flynn said. “We look forward to the unique images she will create that are inspired by the surrounding beauty of Shenandoah National Park”.
Shenandoah’s Artist-in-Residence program is supported by a generous donation from the Shenandoah National Park Trust.
“Donors to the Shenandoah National Park Trust are proud to fund programs like Artist-in-Residence, which explore new opportunities to connect people with this remarkable landscape,” stated Shenandoah National Park Trust President Susan Sherman.
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 