NEW YORK, NY.- Kate Breakey is an internationally recognized artist whose photographic processes include hand-colored archival digital photographs, goldleaf prints on glass called orotones, and photograms on paper. The images in the current show, comprised of copses, trees, tumbleweeds, and landscapes -- selected from the artist’s prodigious travels to various parts of the world – are archival digital photographic prints lightly hand-colored with pencil, pastel, or oil paint which amplifies the otherworldly appearance of her subjects.
At the heart of Breakey's art is a scientist's curiosity about the natural world joined with an artist's passion for its heartbreak and beauty. The content of her photographs, orotones, and photograms become a metaphor for both dramatic and quiet personal events that deeply impact her life. Her lifetime investigation of the natural world is, in her words, ‘brimming with fantastic, mysterious, beautiful things’.
A native of South Australia, Kate moved to Austin, Texas in 1988. She completed a Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Texas in 1991 where she also taught photography in the Department of Art and Art History until 1997. In 1999, she moved to Tucson, Arizona. Since 1980 her work has appeared in more than 95 one-person exhibitions and in over 50 group exhibitions in the US, France, Japan, Australia, China, and New Zealand. The University of Texas Press published her first monograph, Small Deaths, in 2001 with an introduction by A. D. Coleman, and an anthology of her work, Painted Light, in 2010. Her collection of photograms, Las Sombras/The Shadows was published in October 2012. And a collection of her landscape images was published by Etherton Gallery in a 2012 catalogue entitled Slow Light.
Kate Breakey’s work is held in many public institutions including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, the Austin Museum of Art, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and the Osaka Museum in Osaka, Japan. This is the artist’s second solo show at Littlejohn Contemporary.
