Kate Spencer Stewart

"The paintings started months ago, some a year before that, but really it’s been almost a decade because it’s always the same painting. These surfaces took on changes in the atmosphere and wanted to be like this. They wanted blue and more blue against increasing complexities. I brushed on all kinds but in the end it was always PB27, which ranges from bright glaze to dense shadow. Gunner, the red one, was the first to present itself. It sticks out but gives the others something to react to, waiting for the answers to its proposals in paintings to come.

The offerings insisted on existence, too. I can only interact devotionally, or is it peripherally? Every so often a touch, yet they persist here as flowers.

Percussive bells play. Enormous metal pipes that weren’t tuned for an orchestra."

—Kate Spencer Stewart, Los Angeles, 2025

Paul Soto is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist Kate Spencer Stewart at our Los Angeles location. This marks Stewart’s fourth exhibition with the gallery.

Kate Spencer Stewart’s paintings change and charge the space. Resisting imagery, their visible brush strokes echo and flux atop the canvases. The works invite a new perception marked by exhilaration, disorientation, and intoxication. 66-by-66 inch paintings congregate near the gallery’s front, raked by the changing light from the storefront windows. Interspersed throughout are smaller paintings, 12-by-12 inches each. The paintings have reset the room’s gravity.

The large paintings primarily feature layered blue pigments. Although their topmost surfaces have similar colors, the underpaintings lead to distinct expressions of them. Do they declare anything? Nothing more than a flipped wrist. What is blue? Tragedy? The sea? The sky? A chromatic scale? A few metallic compounds?

Under certain light you might see a maelstrom, a misplaced map of the cosmos, a flag for a forgotten nation slicked with gasoline. A marbled cavern: unlike any earthen one you’ve known this cave is depthless, not a space nor place but a lost photograph of the smell of eucalyptus and smoke. To say there is a “sense” of something resolving these layered surfaces is wrongheaded: sense implies a rationality that Stewart’s paintings supersede. They duck and dodge. Their reflective surfaces require you to move your body to try and resolve every gesture—but in the process others gestures wane into light. If the paint follows the path of least resistance, the viewer must trace back the path of the paint to discover they still haven’t found the origin.

On Judy, Alaska, and Cookie, three of the smaller paintings, there are flowers—species of painterly particles. Quantum mechanics maintains that there is a minimum scale to the universe. You go small enough, and everything turns discrete. As flowers move in and out of focus in Judy, it’s not unlike the experience of zooming intensely in on one of Stewart’s larger works: close looking has rewarded you with recognition, although even that recognition is in doubt. The quatrefoil flowers are schematic – symbolic and simplified – and contained from edge-to-edge, flattening into iconography—were you right to call them flowers?

Stewart’s paintings dramatize not only their making but also their being seen: the viewer is pressed into awareness of being with these paintings and of being part of the stagecraft of object, space, and body. A hallucinatory uncertainty lingers like an afterimage burned into your retinas. As light wavers through wind-shaken leaves, one experiences any illumination transiently, as a glory defined only by its own shadow—a negation that is the thing itself: the white wall that insists these paintings have edges, are self-same objects. And it is in their insistence of an edge that boundaries begin to be undone. The arbitrariness of the square, its very physicality, renews focus onto all that escapes the canvas’s grasp. Stewart’s paintings coalesce like a whir or hum in the mind that extends out to pervade space itself.

Kate Spencer Stewart (b. 1984 Phoenix, AZ) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in painting from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Disintegration Suite, Paul Soto, New York (2023); Diurne, Emalin, London (2023); Convention, Bureau, New York (2022); Nature, La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels (2022); Kate Spencer Stewart, Paul Soto, Los Angeles (2020); and The Gallery @ Le Hangar Restaurant, Paris (2019). Stewart’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Domschke House, São Paulo (2023); Hakuna Matata, Los Angeles (2023); Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Vienna (2021); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2021); and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo (2021), among others.