Kate Doyle Artist | Press + Publications

21 Aug Katherine Doyle

Posted at 23:24h in Reviews

American Arts Quarterly, Summer 2007, Volume 24, Number 3. Recent exhibitions of feminist art have been more notable for their political concerns than their aesthetic quality. The art establishment’s historical biases are a legitimate field of inquiry, and content may distinguish the male gaze from the female gaze, but formal aesthetic qualities are universal, even genderless, in their appeal. The figurative paintings by Katherine Doyle recently shown at Gallery Henoch are clearly feminine because of their autobiographical references, but their visual appeal is universal. Self-Portrait with Guy (2006) invites us to speculate on the nature of the relationship between the artist, shown standing at her easel and looking directly at us, and the horizontal torso of a man whose figure is obscured behind a drawing board, his legs entangled with a strange variety of brightly colored objects, tools, bottles, scarves, artist’s supplies and a sinister-looking, de Chirico-style latex yellow glove at the...

21 Aug Kate Doyle – Myth, Dreams and the Real

Posted at 15:48h in Reviews

by David Smith Originally published by Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center. For many artists and critics in the modern world, realism continues to pose old problems of meaning—of how to connect lowly surface description to higher planes of being. Some of the disconnections they wrestle with come from abstractionist apologists’ efforts to reduce representation to the status of mere replica. The disconnects take a variety of forms, but prime among them are those between space and time, the inner and the outer and between art and reality themselves. Again, none of these dichotomies is especially new, but the questions they raise often seem more intractable in their modernist guise than was generally the case in times past. All three sets of questions play into the paintings of Kate Doyle, recently on exhibit at the Tredwell Foundation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is an accomplished and highly cogitated body of work, most of all for...