#hotogallery

Text by Leopold Hornung

FEE KUERTEN's gesture paintings capture the essence of energy, movement, and momentum. For Kuerten, her gestures are akin to portraits, snapshots of fleeting moments. Just as a person’s posture or facial expression constantly shifts with small movements, each gesture in her work represents a transient moment that would soon change.

Her artistic process begins not with the brush, but with the construction of the canvas itself. In this residency, Kuerten transformed large canvases from the gallery’s inventory into smaller, unconventional formats, creating diverse, atypical shapes. The focus is primarily on the process from the careful selection and assembly of materials to the final brushstroke. Both the by-products of this process and the completed work hold equal importance, with each piece contributing to a continuous evolution of form.

Kuerten’s gestures exist in a graphic space defined by the canvas frame, a contrast to the expressive and dynamic motifs. These gestures represent moments of escape from the silent, sterile space of the canvas, suggesting a powerful performance of movement like a dance, or the brush in the artist's hand. In this way, the gesture becomes a figure that moves through space, almost breaking free from the boundaries of the canvas.

The Large Painting of Berlin, displayed in the courtyard, was the very floor where Kuerten painted all the canvases for this exhibition. This piece joins her Large Painting of Boston, exhibited previously on Long Island, created during her time at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. The Large Paintings series serves as a summary of a particular phase of her work, a distillation of its essence, a piece of history tied to places significant to the artist.