KATE ZAMBRANO
Reformation
Over the last year, Kate Zambrano has taken an analytical approach to her artwork, evaluating what exactly she had been creating and what path she wanted to take. What she found was an artistic voice that was free to express and create whatever she wanted rather than remain within the confines of what people wanted to see. From October 13 to November 2, the fruits of her labor will be on view in the exhibition RE/FORM at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco.
“This show is about reformation and honesty,” Zambrano says. “After the algorithm change on social media, many creatives who had made their living online were left out cold. Posts were buried in the ether of the internet without being seen. I spent hours trying to get ahead of it, trying to figure out the new technology. It proved futile, exhausting and soul crushing. I took the lack of response personally.” Knowing, however, that she needed to forge ahead and continue to make art, Zambrano began making pieces she calls “the truest form of my work so far in my career.” She adds, “Before this year, I had figured out my own algorithm on what the masses liked to see in a drawing or painting—a highlight in the eye here, an eyelash shadow there. I was making art for ‘someone’ else. The pieces for RE/FORM are what I have created when I had no one to impress. I have pushed myself harder with this body of work than I feel I have before, and I have found my voice again where it was once stifled.”
On view in the show will be pieces that combine charcoal and pastel, or charcoal and Conté crayon, as well as several oil paintings on hand-held mirrors.
Bradley Platz, the curator of Modern Eden Gallery, shares his take: “Kate Zambrano’s newest series on
found objects breaks tradition from her well-established figurative motifs. These new works explore personal artifacts as metaphor, and a method, for an unfolding process of artistic development. Through this process the figure is disassembled, contextualized, then rediscovered as something new. RE/FORM is Zambrano’s most intimate and perhaps most daring work to date.”
Modern Eden Gallery 801 Greenwich Street • San Francisco, CA 94133 • (415) 956-3303 • www.moderneden.com