Kate Barbee

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present The Hour of the Star, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kate Barbee, a Brooklyn-based artist originally from Dallas, TX. This is Barbee’s first exhibition with the gallery and her New York City solo debut. Barbee’s paintings are densely layered with color, materials, and meanings, bursting with undulating forms and fragmented figures. Her dynamic compositions evoke the tumultuous emotional experience of contemporary urban life, at once playful, anxious, and transcendent.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from the 1977 novella by Ukranian-Brazilian author Clarice Lispector. Lispector’s text follows the life of a young typist living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, whose destitution is placed in contrast to the cosmopolitan city surrounding her. Lispector’s introspective narrative is a patchwork of impressions and reflections, considering the perils of city life, the loss of innocence, and the instability of identity. Barbee’s work shares these concerns, as well as the disorienting pacing of the story, which seems to swirl in constant motion around its central character.

Barbee’s latest body of work follows the artist’s 2023 move from Los Angeles to New York, and the palette conjures scenes from New York nightlife – vivid yellows and pinks, moody blue-purples, and pure blacks. The sensual, feminine subjects of the paintings are glimpsed as if through a kaleidoscope, distorted, reflected, and refracted across the canvas. Barbee hand-sews archival scraps, textural fabrics, and recycled paintings on top of the surface of the works, adding another layer of abstraction to her compositions. These stitched fragments reference the feminized labor of textile crafts and allow Barbee to incorporate tangible trances of her experiences and explorations. In this way, each painting blends Barbee’s inspirations, her desires, and her own self concept to create a sensual, visceral image of life and longing.

Kate Barbee (b. 1994, Dallas, TX) received her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin, TX in 2017.

Barbee has recently exhibited at Kohn Gallery, (Los Angeles, CA), Albertz Benda (New York, NY), San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (San Luis Obispo, CA), UQBAR Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Saatchi Gallery (London, U.K.), The Golden Gate Parlor (Los Angeles, CA), Royal Co-op (Austin, TX), Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX), Co-Lab Gallery (Austin, TX), Activation Gallery (Austin, TX), and Dollhouse Space (Chicago, IL). Barbee was an Artist-in-Residence at the Bed Stuy Art (Brooklyn, NY) in 2021. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Hill Art Foundation (New York, NY), Andrew Xue Collection (Singapore), and Danjuma Collection (London, UK).

Her work has been reviewed in Arte Fuse, Mercer Contemporary, ODDA Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, Artnet, KCRW, Flaunt, Metal Magazine, Art and Cake, Art of Choice, L’Officiel Art, Harper’s Bazaar, VoyageLA, amongst others. She lives and works in New York, NY.