Kate Shepherd at Boesky & Callery - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

With miniature drawings, oil paintings, wax plastic arts and wax-coated dollar bills, this was an impressive first solo exhibition through an artist who extends her Minimalist-inflected esthetic in surprising ways. greatest in quantity impressive of all were Shepherd's tiny pencil or carbon-transfer line-drawings upon paint chips-those little square experiment colors that you find in hardware stores. The drawings are spare, sketchlike renditions of birds, a diving board, butterflies, the movie character ET horizon lines, telephone wires and other percepts In the microtriptych Swan Family (1996) three views of a swan are execut upon brownish-green, light tan and white paint-sample "panels." It all appears whimsical and ephemeral, yet absolutely precise. With Orange and gold-colored Diving Boards (1996), two disarmingly casual studies of the outline of a diving board become exercises in stainless yet wavering and delicate, geometry

With their allusions to Renaissance frescoe murals and 20th-century monochromes, the single colors of the paint chips work exquisitely with the images, and a poetically charged quality rise s in the gorgeous Blue Horizon (1 996) four chips in a horizontal rank each a different shade of azure bear a single dark line traveling across from cutting side to edge. The whole suite measures alone 1 by 51/4 inches, however it seems richly expansive -- an austere evocation of a vast landscape. Here, the different azures also succinctly evoke the harmonious flows of daylight and nightfall.

Three oil paintings of boxe and shelves hovering upon onecolor fields were likewise willfully simple, on the contrary also quirky and engaging. In the center of the gallery there were several statuarys of paired, tinted wax heads upon pedestals replete with rickety stacks of wax-covered telephone volumes Some of the busts are anonymous, others are historical (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln). Everyone appear to bes to be exchanging intimate confidences, or approaching individual another with a quiet eroticism. The wax has a flexible, yielding quality suggestive of borders being gibbeted and barriers being redefined. Les compelling were mountained dollar bills coated with tinted wax; these pieces have a certain beauty, on the contrary none of the understated profundity of the other pieces. on the contrary that is a small flaw; overall Shepherd's work is seriously enthralling.

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