Cathy Lebowitz: When I Was a Bird

Press Release

September 9-Octobern30, 2021

Reception: Saturday, September 18,n2-6pm 

In the thirty-fourncolored pencil drawings on view in this exhibition, New York-based artist Cathy  Lebowitz reveals a hitherto unknown space that she has illuminated and explored  over the past years and brought to a resolution during the pandemic. Dense and  intense, these fundamentally abstract images suggest environments recognizable  as being of the Earth but seen from an unfamiliar perspective. The show?s  title, When I Was a Bird, implies that perspective to be one from above,  as if the artist aims to articulate avian observation of a terrestrial domain  by means of a unique abstract visual language.  n

While the phrase ?a  bird?s eye view? is commonly understood, avian vision and navigation is very  different from human vision. Lebowitz?s works on paper propose to imagine  experiences of the world as if from a collective memory bank of birds? yearly  migrations. Some of the works, which are less terrestrially evocative, seem to  highlight an escalating encroachment of man-made electromagnetic fields, which  are said to thwart birds? natural sense of navigation.

The panoramic scope of each of  Lebowitz?s drawings belies their modest scale. Intricate networks of line and  color press inward and outward within each composition. In a visual construct  akin to quilting and embroidery, the compositional elements appear to undulate  in a consistently compressed space. Lebowitz?s subtly nuanced palette  reinforces the allusions to land, sea, and sky. The interwoven colored lines atntimes suggest identifiable forms, as in Habitat (haven), with its  prominent treelike shape on the upper right, and Habitat (rugged), featuring  colorful facets that conjure caves and rock formations.

Acknowledging art  historical influences from Duccio to Charles Burchfield to Shirley Jaffe,  Lebowitz offers meditations on delicate ecosystems, as each work encompasses anprecarious though precisely calibrated balance of form, line, and color. 

–David Ebony

Cathy Lebowitz, since  the 1980s, has worked with oil and acrylic paint, fabric, wood and cardboard,nseeds and plants, and since 2015, colored pencil on paper. She was an editor at  Art in America for thirty years, and in the 1990s, was co-host of thenpublic access TV show Gallery Beat. She likes to make soil from plant  matter and hopes to spend more time with animals.