Kate Spencer Stewart

Emalin is pleased to present Diurne, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kate Spencer Stewart (b. 1984 in Phoenix, AZ, US). This is Stewart’s first exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition comprises seven paintings in oil on linen. Each one is square, and the series spans three sizes – ranging between vast fields and focused vignettes, each painting represents Stewart’s attempt to paint ‘nothing, or the void’. The canvases are made of tightly woven linen. Stewart uses them because of their particular relationship with light: the linen’s grain mounted with oil paint’s luminosity. The texture of Stewart’s brushstrokes in oil paint crushed with mineral and synthetic pigments is brought into focus as it reflects light in cyclical patterns. Her paintings appear at the same time as pure surface and as pure depth, one moment impenetrable and another a plunge.

Their cycles are woven back into the exhibition’s texture with its title, Diurne. Meaning the quality of a life led in the daytime, diurnality is the sister of nocturnality, which in turn describes music written to be set in the night. The exhibition is presented without artificial light: circadian rhythms will transform the surfaces of Stewart’s paintings throughout its duration. The ambient hum of light and its city flows in and out of their picture plane.