After her entrance in the collections of Charles Saatchi and Thomas Olbricht, her participation in the remarkable exhibition "Dead or Alive: Nature Becomes Art" in 2010 at the Museum of Arts and Design of New York and more recently in «Memories of the Future» at the Maison Rouge, we are very happy to announce the first Kate MccGwire’s solo show at La Galerie Particulière.Kate MccGwire evolves in a fascinating and fantastic world.

Enchantress for some, witch for others, she plays with so many styles that her works leave nobody indifferent.

From pigeon feathers patiently collected, cleaned, assembled, she creates since 2004 an original fauna with blended and intertwined shapes, animated by movements and wavy motions which seem endowed of life and capacity of expansion. This bestiary, which comes straight out of a fairytales book without beginning or end, brings us back to obscure and uncertain times, seeming at the same time incredibly familiar.

Just according this surprising phenomenon Kate MccGwire has been developing the main features of her work: playing together with ordinary materials, which are easily identifiable but at the same time uncommon, Kate MccGwire partly takes up again the Freudian concept of the «Unheimlich» (the stranger, or literally, the inhospitable), i.e. the idea of a space where the familiar can in some way provoke fear. The primary nature of the material persists in our minds and nearly disturbs our vision.

Referring to collective imagination, associations of ideas and conscious or unconscious oppositions, Kate MccGwire questions the notion itself of Beauty. This is intended as a sentiment independent from the aesthetic quality: a beauty which can be problematic, complex and even revolting. The artist makes beautiful what normally it is not so, and plays constantly with our perceptions up to make these «curios» sacred through the preciosity of ancient display cabinets.

Finally Kate MccGwire puts at the core of her research the relationship between the work and the viewer. Since the first pencil drawings, the recurrent circular or spiral shapes create a sort of «attraction field» which pushes the viewer to get closer to the work, breaking the natural distance with which we observe a new object. In front of these indefinable works, we are like magnetized, and whether we love or reject what we see, we are absorbed by the work whose memory will last fixed in us.

The Galerie Particulière is very happy to present for the first time in France this work which fascinates for its uniqueness, meticulousness, its research field and its rarity

info@galerieparticuliere.com