Booker/Gilpin: Psychological Paintings

Melzi Fine Art is proud to present Booker/Gilpin: Psychological Paintings, a duo exhibition featuring the introspective works of Kim Booker and Rebecca Gilpin. Opening on November 7, 2024, and running through January 20, 2025, the exhibition invites viewers to explore the psychological landscapes of these two contemporary artists. Their paintings delve into the deep recesses of the human mind, emotion, and identity, examining how memory, emotion, and chance play out on canvas.

Kim Booker approaches painting as a physical and emotional act, expressing the complex psychology of the female experience. Working in acrylic on large canvases, she uses bold colors, dynamic gestures, and figurative elements to reveal the emotional tension embedded within her subjects. This latest body of work showcases her signature visceral scratches, smudges, and charcoal markings, balancing abstract color fields with drawn figures.

Charcoal, for Booker, represents both literal and psychological darkness, contrasting with her vibrant use of color. Her process is messy and unconstrained, marked by a constant negotiation between light and shadow, chaos and control. With her hands, she scrubs out, overpaints, and redefines the canvas, creating a dialogue between the seen and unseen, the deliberate and the accidental. In this way, Booker’s work is a reflection of inner conflict and psychological tension, where each mark on the canvas embodies the struggle between emotion and thought.

Booker’s use of historical imagery, particularly the female form as depicted in Renaissance and medieval art, allows her to reimagine classical ideals through a female gaze. By placing her own experiences and emotions into these traditional frameworks, she explores the dichotomies of beauty versus shame, control versus surrender, and thought versus feeling. Her paintings become confessional, a direct confrontation with the vulnerabilities and brutalities of the female body in a world marked by rigid expectations and social pressures.

Rebecca Gilpin, in contrast, takes a more abstract approach to exploring psychological depth. Working across two distinct methods—primed oil paintings and soak-stain works on unprimed canvas—Gilpin’s large-scale pieces reflect her fascination with the interplay between chance, memory, and emotion. Her soak-stain technique, inspired by childhood experiences in India, results in fluid, layered compositions where color and water interact freely on the canvas. These pieces are spontaneous, embodying the emotional immediacy of her process, where layers of paint are applied and absorbed, echoing the uncontrollable nature of human emotion.

Gilpin’s oil paintings, on the other hand, are assertive and bold, using thick layers of paint to create textured surfaces that evoke the physicality of her process. Her works are often autobiographical, drawing from her personal experiences and inspirations, but they are also open to interpretation, allowing viewers to project their own emotional and psychological responses onto the canvas. The titles of her works, frequently borrowed from song lyrics, add another layer of meaning, bridging the gap between personal narrative and collective memory.

In Booker/Gilpin: Psychological Paintings, both artists explore the boundaries of self and psyche, revealing the complex interplay between thought and feeling, control and chaos, light and dark. Together, they create a dialogue on the ways in which the human experience is mediated through the act of painting.