Encounters and Connections: Recent sculptures by Katherine Gili

About

It is said that the romantic movement, which began in similar times to ours, and whose influence is still reverberating today, drew impetus and momentum from a realisation that life was a continuous stream of sensations emanating from the natural world. But sculpture, as always, the rock upon which theories about art flounder, is a stubborn thing. Sculpture asserts its materiality, its substance, its physicality, rather than sitting there as a flitting, fleeting thing that has somehow structured itself, its ethereal moment captured. Sculpture comes to us like an ordinary thing amongst the little things we use from day to day and yet all that it requires of us; is that we look at it, interrogate it with our eyes and take whatever meaning from there. Looking closely at Katherine Gili’s sculpture, rather than a series of sensations, we see a sustained physical immediacy of growing form, of encounters, volumes meeting face to face, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, sometimes unexpectedly. Masses enjoined, tensed, sheared, squeezed, enveloping but fastened emphatically, articulating, sending pulses inward. But then a sense of building from within to without, of building up from down and back again, of rolling but not tumbling, of transition through and through. These elements tend to appear first as rhythms and then as shapes whose material qualities and proto three- dimensional qualities converge together as structure. It is these connected encounters that give birth to the expressive power and plastic rhythm of the whole. They convey and project the sense of weight and density. The nature of this projection is not monolithic. Certainly, the overall tensions are conveyed with great force in the steel sculptures, but the accumulated forces experienced in the bronze from paper piece are much more nuanced and expressed with calmness and delicacy. Such is the range of Katherine’s sensibility. That these encounters and connections are felt; is not to say the material has been used as a recipient of aggressive, furious activity as the frenzied artist transmitted the emotions of the moment, usually negative, directly into the thing in front of her, as though the sculpture was a record or a trace of actual, autobiographical emotion. The feeling comes from a sub-conscious response to the making of the elements and in the determining of their relationship to each other and to the; as then unrealised whole, in a way known only unto itself. That is what distinguishes sculpture from all other things in the world. That is the central mystery of all art, a thing to be marvelled at, enjoyed by the observer, and not explained away.

Robert Persey (sculptor), 2022

About Katherine Gili

b.1948, Oxford, UK
Lives and works in Kent, England

Katherine Gili graduated from Bath Academy of Art in 1970 then spent a year juggling earning a living with making sculpture in London. Having written to and then met with Anthony Caro she went on to study at St Martin’s School of Art on his recommendation. In 1973 she set up a studio at Stockwell Depot alongside a group of like-minded artists. The group established a reputation with a series of annual exhibitions throughout the decade, during which Gili’s work received considerable attention. So much so that sculptures from this period were purchased by the Arts Council at the time and later by the Tate. This also led to a solo exhibition in New York with several of Gili’s sculptures from this period now in private collections in the USA. In 1978 she moved to the Greenwich Studios and began to radically develop her work, which in turn led to exhibitions at Tate Gallery in 1984 and the Conde Duque Centre in Madrid in1988. Katherine Gili’s sculpture has been exhibited in both solo and group shows well over a hundred times and her career is marked by contributions to seminal survey exhibitions at major venues such as the Hayward Gallery (three times) and the Henry Moore Institute. She has regularly shown in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions, in 2013 her sculpture “Ripoll” won the Sculpture Prize. Gili taught part-time at several art schools, most notably St Martins and Norwich and served as a selector for exhibitions such as “New Contemporaries 1978”, “Serpentine Summer Show 1979” and “Have You Seen Sculpture from the Body?” at Tate Gallery in 1984. She scaled back these commitments on moving to Kent in 1995. Gili’s work is represented in public and corporate collections in the UK, Switzerland, and the USA. Lord Foster selected one of her pieces to stand alongside the Cranfield University Institute of Technology Library in 1992. Her sculptures can also be found in many private collections in Britain, Spain, and the USA.

This is Katherine Gili’s fourth solo exhibition with the Felix & Spear Gallery.