Catherine Lepp: A Second Body

Catherine Lepp will be presenting a new body of work in a solo exhibition curated by Karen Wilkin for Equity Gallery. The show features large-scale, black and white works on paper, canvas and plastic globes depicting the artist’s studio and its attendant props – foremost a three-quarter-sized, home-made, sexless, headless pantyhose puppet. 

Despite the artworld’s seemingly inexhaustible obsession with passing trends, one constant, that of the artist working from the live model, remains largely intact. That persistence is notable given the abundant array of materials and processes informing contemporary art production — suggesting that the challenge of arriving at a compelling plastic expression in response to the human body still resonates. 

Beyond the aesthetic exchange informing the artist-model pairing, there are consistent examples throughout art history whereby artists, motivated by love and/or economic necessity, enlisted their lovers and marital partners as studio models. Salai’s famed angelic beauty won him a modeling spot (with room and board) in Leonardo DaVinci’s workshop in spite of his incorrigible philandering. Pierre Bonnard painted his wife Marthe, who never aged and seemed forever to be bathing. Pablo Picasso, with an oeuvre saturated with paintings of his numerous wives and lovers, heads the procession of artists indebted to their model/muses. 

So seemingly attached is art making to the human body that the need for a reasonable substitute arose when no living bodies could be pressed into service. Hence the invention of the artist’s mannequin, a stand-in well able to withstand the rigor (in fetishistic stillness) of six-hour poses. From William Hogarth to Thomas Gainsborough, artists employed mannequins, and like the live models they replicated, these understudies became objects of love and desire. Oskar Kokoschka treated his as a surrogate companion and is rumored to have beheaded it when the love affair soured.

Catherine Lepp’s substitute muse is a near life-sized, artist-made, sexless, headless pantyhose puppet tied up with strings, clamped into place for each pose and stuffed into a suitcase when not in use. Hardly loveable. Lepp adds, “My latest works are inhabited by a second body made from pillows, metal coat hangers, and hosiery. She/It has legs, a torso and arms, but no head and it can’t stand up.” Flopping about, spineless, and as charming as a post-coital praying mantis, Lepp’s puppet is an eye-stopping response to Titian’s boneless, pillowy reclining nudes. She/It appears centerstage in a series of mural-scale, black and white interiors depicting the artist’s studio re-imagined as a black box theater. Teetering suggestively, if not impossibly, on a flattened cubist idea of a stool, Lepp’s “second body” is joined by a random ensemble of studio objects — among them potted plants, window fans, an owl figurine, a propped-open door — their appearances distilled to a Sumi Master simplicity. Seen in a coruscating light, these staged compositions recall Tintoretto’s candle-lit modellas, their unstable illumination captured with a brush loaded with white lead speed-skating across a midnight ground. 

There’s a lot to see and analyze in these works. Lepp’s “second body,” grotesque and starkly silhouetted in ghostly white, belies the absence of the live model rather than offering a believable facsimile. Similar paradoxes abound; the modeling of still-life objects and background architectural elements are suppressed, yet they are grounded on an insistent perspectival grid.  Simultaneously suggesting illusionistic pictorial space while amplifying each object’s flatness, the compositions dissolve into surface patterns and resound with a dissonant, yet captivating, spatial tension. Narrative scale distortions and the blurring of distinctions between inside and outside space offer additional signposts suggesting that Lepp’s “second body” has one foot in the Renaissance and one in the Middle Ages, allowing her to rummage through art histories cherry-picking strategies best suited to touring her viewers through the make-believe twilight world that is the artist’s studio. 

Catherine Lepp was born in Sheffield, United Kingdom. She has in lived in New York City since graduating from Manchester Polytechnic with a BFA in painting in 1989. Lepp resumed her studies in 2001 at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture. While raising her children, and working as a photo producer and set painter, she attended residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2004 and the Vermont Studio Center in 2005.

Lepp teaches in the Fine Arts Department at Fashion Institute of Technology, the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, and Mount Gretna School of Art. Her previous solo show, The Swimmer series, 2007–2021, was presented in September 2021 and at the Mark Borghi Gallery in Sag Harbor, New York. She resides in a live/work studio in Brooklyn. 

Karen Wilkin is a New York–based independent curator and art critic specializing in 20th-century modernism. Educated at Barnard College and Columbia University, she is the author of monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Isaac Witkin, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Giorgio Morandi, Georges Braque, and Hans Hofmann, and has organized exhibitions of their work internationally. She was a juror for the American Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale and a contributing editor of the Stuart Davis and Hans Hofmann Paintings Catalogues Raisonné. The Contributing Editor for Art for the Hudson Review and a regular contributor to The New Criterion, Hopkins Review, and the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Wilkin teaches in the New York Studio School’s MFA program. Recent projects include “A Controlled Moment of Light: the 1970s,” a section of Poons, the first monograph on Larry Poons, published by Abbeville Press, 2023, and the exhibition Stephen Antonakos Drawings: Geometry and Space, New York Studio School Gallery, 2023