Patty Cateura

Patty Cateura
Pond, 2003
Acrylic on canvas
18" x 24"

Ms Cateura paints deceptively simple color field paintings that, “question how we experience and relate to nature in an increasingly urbanized world.” Painted in acrylic on canvas, these peculiar geometric shapes float seemingly weightless in spaces of intense monochromatic colors and are on closer inspection a building, or a machine or beams of headlights on a mountain road at midnight. Behind the serene whimsy of her visual meditations Cateura laboriously manipulates the color and position of objects in each composition. Rather than relying on premixed color she makes the paint in every painting from scratch by mixing pigment with acrylic medium and water. The placement of objects in each piece is methodically worked out to create expanses of space and acts as a foil to the flatness of her color fields. These abstract allusions to our physical world are grounded in an imaginary solid, yet enigmatic space of trees, lakes and mountains. By playfully juxtaposing the natural and man-made worlds Cateura's work explores more than the intersection of minimalism, Pop and Asian art that she notes as influences. She hopes to question the control humans think they have over nature. By highlighting the simplicity of nature through color and minimal abstraction in an almost cartoonish landscape she intends to provide a contemplative space in our increasingly frenetic, technologically based lives that demonstrates nature’s color, simplicity and vibrancy.

Patty Cateura maintains her studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City. She received her BA From Oberlin College in Oberlin, OH and her MFA in 1993 from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. In 1994 she studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME.