Kate Burling

Kate Burling is an artist from south-east London, whose devotional paintings dissolve the self into its fluid surroundings. Where hands melt into furniture and swaddled torsos float like apparitions, Burling’s phantasmagoria of fleshy forms unfold, weaving and gliding. 

Burling describes her approach to materiality as bodily. In recent work, the artist applies paint with her fingers and the palms of her hands. She uses the texture of woven canvas to rub pigment beneath the surface, bringing her subjects out of focus. Where edges soften, the artist reveals luminous under-paintings which form hazy halos around her central subjects. The results are paintings with unmistakeable presence, vibrating with heated tension and dissipating explosive energy from their core.