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The June Kelly Gallery is pleased to open its
2025-2026 season with an exhibition of Karin Batten's resplendent
abstract improvisations of color, texture, and crafty colocation of
form. The title Swimming on Mars reflects the artist s
persistent fascination and engagement with the natural world during
her travels and her love of water. The exhibition will
open at 166 Mercer Street on September 4 and continue until October
14, 2025.
The late Martica Sawin, art critic, author,
and art historian, wrote that, on Batten s travels, she draws and
takes photos of the natural world that find their way into her
paintings, which also make reference to space technology, seascapes,
and aerial views of urban landscapes. Drawing on experiences
with ceramics, metal sculpture, and various materials, she builds
paintings with unified, richly textured surfaces that have the
tactile feel of sculpture.
Batten explains that in recent years she has
built visual worlds based on memories from her childhood, travels,
long-distance swimming, space technology, seascapes, and aerial
views of urban landscapes. In her mixed media paintings, she
uses the brightness of light to depict the exotic atmosphere and
textures of the land and water she has experienced. Batten
improvises with shapes, digital images, collage, texture, rich
fields of color, and space.
She writes that her work is inspired by the
vivid, unique places she discovers. While traveling and
swimming. These authentic discoveries leave me with a feeling
for intense color that I work to capture in my paintings. I am
left with each work having itstten own story and its unique world.
Batten s brilliantly colored, unpredictable,
and lyrical forms with random gestural markings redefine painterly
space as she explores abstraction and representation. Complex
with delightfully curious patterns, ambiguous with identity, each
painting contains a representative image left on the cusp of
perception.
Batten s paintings feature distinct visible
shapes that do not depend on traditional Western art convention, the
structured ranking of form hierarchy. Batten s sense of freedom
allows her to continue creating mesmerizing color paintings, and to
influence form. She re-characterizes the laws of gravity, to
distort perspective, while remaining anchored by the abstract
qualities of the paint, intense hues, deep textures, and swirling
brushstrokes, as seen in (Swimming on Mars, 2018, mixed media
on panel, 36 x 40 inches).
While Batten concedes to working spontaneously
and intuitively, losing all boundaries, much like swimming on
Mars. She says, I ruminate over my work a long time, attempting to
transcend my inflexible upbringing in the bleakness of bombed-out
Hamburg in postwar Germany.
Batten lives and works in New York. She
was educated in Hamburg, London, and New York, where she earned a
master s degree in fine arts from Hunter College. In 2019,
Batten was awarded a Pollock-Krasner grant. Her work has been
exhibited in many one-person and group exhibitions throughout the
United States and Europe, including Berlin, Paris, and Z rich.
She is represented in numerous public and private collections,
including the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, New York;
Belk Visual Arts Center, Davidson College, North Carolina; The
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Pfizer Incorporated, New York,
Reliance National Insurance, New York, Gallerie 70, Berlin, Germany
and the US Embassy, Mbabane, Swaziland, Africa.
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