Cat Show

About

The demeanour, attitude, role and presence of the cat has been captured by artists as long as cats have been in our lives. Their love and their vengeance, their unwillingness to give up on their wild ways, the mayhem and calm they can be responsible for. Their unwillingness to constant easy fit, imbuing them with a character and personality that demands to be recorded. Their facets stilled and hung on gallery walls, carved, cast, constructed and set on gallery floors and pedestals, distributed on printed page, remaining reminding in artists and observer’s magpie minds.

From Picasso and his Cat Catching a Bird variations, each simultaneous depictions of feline malice and commentaries upon the onset of the cruelties of war, Baselitz and his fenced off brutish cat headed man, Balthus and Kirchner and their intimate relaxed girls with calm constant cat companions. The more innocent world of Beatrix Potter, all little people despite their fur, Louis Wain who outgrew their clothes and became barely contained electricity, Gwen John who gave them grace and poise with her delicate watercolour strokes. Karel Appel and the childlike abandon of hue and form they became, Bonnard and his perfectly elongated white cat, and of course Warhol’s brightly hued lithographed parade of gentler house trained cats. Their painted and sculpted evocations have been seen and admired, sometimes with as much urgency as their furry source.

The artists included in Cat Show also reveal their own contemporaneous considered reactions, through painted expressions, constructed forms, as they are and what they do, as characters and creatures, as loved ones sad departed. The comfort and support and the tribulations of their sharper side, made visible through eleven sets of eyes and hands. Attendants, lingerers, players, resters, fighters, whole clowders of them, their obsessions, their urges, their facsimiles, their long shadow after they have gone, our complicated relationship with what was once feral seen in unison.