Karin Davie’s work explores the intersection of representation and abstraction through flamboyant fusions of color and curved lines. Davie is interested in the performative nature of painting–the use of the body in creating a painting–and this physicality is echoed in the rounded, bodily shapes in her work. Davie takes the stripe, used since postwar abstraction by such important artists as Frank Stella and Bridget Riley, and turns it into an organic and dynamic pattern.

“I liked using something very familiar, like the stripe, that had been used in popular culture,” says Davie. Also influenced by modernist choreographer Trisha Brown, Davie uses her entire body to create the enormous canvases. She says, “It’s like a dance, in a sense–the movement, the process, the image. But something else has to enter in, the moment you are making the painting.”

Her latest series, Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated, including three brand-new paintings created for this exhibition, will be on view at SITE Santa Fe. Ken Johnson, in a recent review in The New York Times, writes, “The best bet for immediate aesthetic gratification right now is Karin Davie. Ms. Davie continues to do what made her known in the late 1990’s, painting loopy abstractions in which wide, striated ribbons fill the canvases in undulating waves. Painted in intense high-contrast colors, the whirls seem to balloon into three-dimensional space and push against the rectangular edges of the canvases, threatening to explode from the confines of pictorial space.”

Karin Davie is organized by SITE SANTA FE, courtesy of the artist and Mary Boone Gallery, New York.