Kate Newby

Fine Arts, Sydney is presenting an exhibition of new work by Kate Newby.

The exhibition centres on a substantial work that has developed over six years. Kate Newby’s ‘miles off road’ is a work that spans the room with handmade ropes from which hang elements formed in materials including bronze, white brass, porcelain, and wood-fired stoneware. It is a work embedded with the passages of time in and between places in North America, and now for its exhibition as fully developed and complete at the gallery in Sydney. Begun in 2017 at Kate Newby’s then-studio in Greenpoint, New York, the work was installed outdoors in 2018 in Long Island City, New York, where for two years it was exposed to the sun, snow, wind, and air of the city. Newby added elements to the work every two months over the course of this time, continually changing and growing the work. In 2020 Newby expanded the work with the addition of new metal pieces cast at a jewellery foundry from forms the artist made in materials as diverse as cooked rice and couscous. While developing this work Newby relocated her home and working studio to a ranch near Floresville, Texas. There she incorporated elements of wood-fired stoneware and refined the arrangement of forms and their suspension from three roughly-parallel lines of handmade ropes tied to wall fixings made in cast bronze.

In the exhibition this expansive work is accompanied by a body of new and more intimately scaled sculptures in cast glass, formed in Texas and cast in rural New South Wales. There are small sculptures that replace the gallery’s doorhandles, giving functional tactility to her material forms. There are ceramic works for the wall, and floor-based sculptures in ceramic that hold kiln-fired pools of broken glass collected by the artist from the city streets of Melbourne and the city streets and beaches of Sydney.

Kate Newby has often talked of the value of ‘active observation’, and this is an exhibition of work that can’t be just stood and looked at but touched, walked along, under, over and around, down to the end and back.

Kate Newby has recently made solo exhibitions at institutions in Europe and North America including Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, France; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway; lumber room, Portland, United States; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Artpace, San Antonio, United States; Fogo Island Gallery, Newfoundland, Canada; and Gesellschaft für Actuelle Kunst, Bremen, Germany. Her work has been included in exhibitions at institutions including Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, United States; Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, United States; Musée d'art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne - Château de Rochechouart, Rochechouart, France; SculptureCenter, New York, United States; Arnolfini, Bristol, United Kingdom; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France; and the 1st Brussels Biennial.

In Australasia, Kate Newby’s work was recently the focus of a survey exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, and featured in the 21st Biennale of Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and on Cockatoo Island. Her work has been included in curated exhibitions at institutions including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Artspace, Sydney; Artspace, Auckland; Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland; and with numerous artist run initiatives.

Kate Newby lives and works in Floresville, Texas, United States. She was born in Te Henga, Aotearoa New Zealand in 1979, and studied at University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts where she attained Doctor of Fine Arts in 2015. She was awarded the Walters Prize in 2012, and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2019.

This is Kate Newby’s third solo exhibition with Fine Arts, Sydney.

For further information please contact the gallery directly.