Kate Meissner

CV | Press | Exhibitions

Kate Meissner’s carefully constructed oil paintings depict sensuous human forms of highly ambiguous societal identity and material nature. In compressed, vividly-lit spaces, these bodies pose and contort as if to privately perform for the viewer’s pleasure enveloped in a state of ecstasy or pain. Meissner’s paintings are populated by multiple species: idealized feminine forms rendered in supple gradients, non-normative and emphatically fleshy beings with prosthetic appendages, and alien creatures for whom a digitally-inflected perfection of sleek surfaces becomes uncanny. Nightclub VIP rooms, hospitals, and theaters inform Meissner’s settings - all places where being perceived, surveilled, and probed has distinct visceral psychological consequences. The figurative element is always tenuous, made strange by theatrical chiaroscuro, shifting depictions of skin, atypical anatomy, and cryptic motivations. Through her fusion of traditional naturalism, technologically-derived imaging, lush cinematic effect, and BDSM aesthetics, Meissner explores the beautiful and grotesque in paintings that are as unnerving as they are seductive.

Kate Meissner (b. 1995, Sacramento, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, CN; The Mer Collection, Madrid, ES; and Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, US. She received her MFA from Yale University. Meissner is represented by Lyles & King, New York.