leif kath

sometimes we are somewhere else

february 7 – march 8 , 2008

reception: thursday, february 7, 6-8 pm

The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to present sometimes we are somewhere else an exhibition of new paintings by the Danish artist Leif Kath. This will be the artist's first one person exhibition with the gallery. The Gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street , 6 th floor, and is open Tuesday through Saturday 11–6 pm. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, February 7, from 6-8 pm.

“ Leif Kath's pictorial language moves almost gracefully on the edge of the truly formless without becoming so. His motifs, whether in paintings, drawings, graphic art, or carvings, seem to deal with the depiction of nothing as form, form which, in its essence, is plastic and therefore indeterminable from picture to picture. Leif Kath seems to be experimenting his way farther out to where a genuinely recognizable language of forms cannot establish itself – that is to say, a kind of iconisation of the forms. He changes and twists the forms from one piece to the next, often by contrasting the colors black and white.

Leif Kath's painterly practice often escapes a linguistic dimension. His main purpose would seem to be a kind of painting which is difficult to describe, but is experienced as perception only. His motifs seem to have been built on a lost grid pattern, only parts of which were used. Or like a crossword puzzle in which some of the squares cannot be answered, but remain as white spaces.

Leif Kath's paintings have a very particular character which makes each painting stand alone, but which in the context of an exhibition, becomes a kind of map or puzzle, resulting in the perception of something indefinable, in the same way that, in a street or a forest, one notices a scent of something one cannot determine or locate, and which ends up as a stanza of a song or a poem, the rest of which has disappeared.”

Erik Meistrup (translated from Danish by Christopher and Karsten Sand-Iversen)

There is a fully illustrated catalog that accompanies this exhibition .

For further information contact Miles Manning at 212 463-9666.