The Armory Show

With a fascination for hands, torsos, and bodily fragments, Katarina Riesing uses negative space as a conceptual and physical void. Hand painted with dye and bleach on raw silk, and embellished with delicate iridescent embroidery, her work is bold and confrontational. Smaller paintings zoom in on close croppings, and larger ones explode with minute silvery striations on top of stark black voids or blood red contrasting silk.

These works reveal, conceal, or camouflage, layering flesh with embroidered veils, the thread purposefully befuddling as it delineates in achingly laborious multi-colored patterns. Riesing shows bodies hunched, mirrored, and entwined, with background, figures, and shadow ambiguously enmeshed. Her practice has evolved, now working with multi-directional gold and silver threads, activating drawing, line, rhythm, and pattern-making as a way to visually rip apart the body, and make it fresh and unknowable again.