about
Katerina Lanfranco makes paintings, drawings, cutouts, mixed media sculptures, and installations.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Through my art practice, I explore aspects of nature, science, and fantasy. I collect, organize, and recombine images and objects from nature and everyday life to make new fantastical paintings and sculptures. My work seeks to explore the apparent duality of culture and nature. I make art as a way to ask questions about the world that I live in:
How do I make the invisible visible?
At what point does fantasy become reality?
How do we relate to nature and its forms, cycles, and rhythms?
With each of my exhibitions I consider the total experience of the viewer, and how they move through the architectural setting of the space to encounter the art. I often include installation elements, shifts of scale, and material to activate the senses. Thinking of nature through the lens of culture, I reference different modes of representing nature, such as botanical illustrations, floral fabric patterns, curio cabinets, scientific notes, dioramas, and mandalas. My work pays homage to the poet traditions of Symbolist and Visionary Art, as well as mystical landscapes of Romanticism, and the bold color of Fauvists and Les Nabis. I also seek a spiritual experience through nature like the Hudson River Valley painters who sought this in their transcendentalist landscape paintings.
Landscapes, sacred geometry, natural history, biological structures, and genetic engineering are recurring themes. I am interested in how we, as humans, create meaning in relation to the natural world. My current body of work explores geometry and patterns found in nature combined with landscape painting that explores healing, memory, and mysticism.
Katerina Lanfranco is an NYC-based artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York where she makes paintings, drawings, mixed media works, and sculptures. She was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and spent her early childhood in Berlin, Germany. As a teenager, she lived in Bangalore, India. Lanfranco earned her BA in Art and in Visual Theory and Museum Studies from UC Santa Cruz, and her MFA in Studio Art in Painting from Hunter College, City University of New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Kupferstichkabinett Museum of Prints and Drawings in Berlin, and the Corning Museum of Glass.
She is the recipient of several awards and residencies including Japan-US Creative Exchange Fellowship Artist-in-Residence Award; DNA Artist Residency, Sugar Shack Artist-in-Residence; Vermont Studio Center; Pollock Krasner Fellowship at the Byrdcliffe Artist Residency; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Artist in Residence with Flux Factory; Tony Smith Award from Hunter College; Hunter College Exchange Scholarship to study at UdK Berlin, Germany; and the William Graft Memorial Fund Travel Grant to research High Baroque Italian painting. She has been invited as a guest artist and critic to colleges and residency programs in California, New York, Tennessee, and Florida. She writes about art that interests her on POVarts.com. Lanfranco founded Rhombus Space in 2013 and was Chief Curator at Trestle Gallery from 2015 to 2018. Her work has been represented by the Nancy Hoffman Gallery since 2006. Lanfranco’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, and internationally in Toronto, Canada; Berlin, Germany; Milan, Italy; and Kyoto, Japan.
Recent shows include solo shows Nature Poems at Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Mystic Geometry at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Efflorescence at the SCPS Gallery at Pratt Manhattan, Talk to the Moon at Day & Night Projects in Atlanta, Georgia, and Shadow Light at HOUSEGallery in Philadelphia. Her work has been reviewed in ARTnews, ARTinfo, and The New York Times.
