Galerie Lelong: Dialogues: Kate Shepherd with Isabelle Dervaux

Known for her richly colored paintings built with layers of monochromatic enamel, Kate Shepherd’s decades-long exploration of perspectival space investigates the relationship of paintings to their environments; the various reflective surfaces establishing a spatial discourse across the panel, the viewer, and the gallery space. Panels in materials like wood and aluminum that connote the architecture for which the paint is meant form the basis of the paintings. This method results in a gleaming, reflective surface, which allows the viewers to see their own reflections and also guards the intimate image from view. Using methods such as hand painting thin linear constructions and interrupting the surface by sanding the glossy enamel, Shepherd incorporates geometric forms in her work that imply dimensional space on the two-dimensional surface. Being situationally reactive to light and movement, the paintings take on sculptural characteristics in their constant change. The artist’s oeuvre also encompasses works on paper, which examine her constantly evolving exploration of color.

Shepherd has exhibited at museums and galleries across the United States and Europe since 1994. Her most recent museum solo exhibitions include Kate Shepherd: Lineaments, Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, North Carolina, and Intersections: Relation to and yet not (homage to Mondrian) by Kate Shepherd, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Shepherd’s work is featured in numerous museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; and Seattle Art Museum, Washington.

The artist lives and works in New York City, where she was born in 1961.

Isabelle Dervaux is an art historian and curator. From 2005 to 2023 she was the Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Previously she held curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the National Academy Museum, New York. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a Master’s degree from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She has curated numerous exhibitions on twentieth-century European and American art, including Surrealism USA (2005); Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings (2010); Dan Flavin: Drawing (2012); Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney (2013); Dubuffet Drawings (2016); Georg Baselitz: Six Decades of Drawings (2022); Entrance to the Mind: Drawings by George Condo (2023)and Ferdinand Hodler: Drawings (2023). She has published extensively on modern and contemporary art, notably essays on Surrealism, Josef Albers, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, and Tom Wesselmann.