Kate Newby’s NY Art Rose Through Cracks

In New York, on the Lower East Side, Laurel Gitlen gallery features two tile works that Kate Newby, the sculptor and ceramist, calls “murals”. Hung like paintings, they incorporate found objects, specifically glass, gathered from specific locales: the neighbouring streets of New York, in “I Hate and Love” (2022) and Auckland, in the artist’s native New Zealand, for “It’s Close” (2022), John Vincler reports for The New York Times.

Seeing the rest of the exhibition, called “We are such stuff”, feels like being let in on a secret. It continues in the building’s underused semi-public spaces upstairs, Vincler writes.

Back downstairs, the gallerist reached in her pocket to show one of three “pocket works” by Newby, 43, in the exhibition.

This one, called “Want to Start at the Beginning?” (2022), included a cast white brass replica of a soda can pull-tab and other rocklike objects made of stoneware, silver and Limoges porcelain. The work felt at once precious and subversive to touch and intentionally requires that the person working in the gallery begin a conversation with gallery visitors.

Original article by John Vincler, The New York Times, October 9, 2022.

Photo by Charles Benton.