Kathryn Maple – A Year of Drawings

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Gethin Evans, Towards Skomer – study 3 graphite and pencil on paper 135cm x 105cm 2016, who is exhibiting at the Tregony Gallery Drawing In exhibition Also announced today, Kiki Xuebing Wang is awarded the first Emerging Artist Prize, supported by Winsor & Newton

Winning first prize in 2020 with ‘The Common’, now part of the gallery’s permanent collection, Kathryn is the second John Moores Painting Prize winner to be given the opportunity to present work in a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery. As part of the prize, Walker Art Gallery will also host a solo exhibition of your work next year. How do you think people will feel about returning to physical art spaces again? This exhibition, as well as showing his nudes, is also an opportunity to discover his intriguing and unusual sculptures, an often forgotten area of his practice. For familiarity, alongside these radical and exciting elements are shown portraits he made of his lovers, friends and patrons, including well-know portraits of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and Jeanne Hébuterne.It takes its revolutionary aim further and allows you to vote for a work to be ‘released’ from storage and put on public display. This hopes to open up the idea that museums could be democratic, and trial what happens if you democratically curate an exhibition. The painting is based on two worlds – Uneo park in Tokyo, a verdant oasis of calm away from the city, and the people she sees near her home in Lewisham, south-east London. She describes the painting, measuring 2.2 metres by 2.4 metres, as a “meeting place, an intersection, people seemingly aware of each other, but minds elsewhere … all sharing an open space”. She graduated in 2011 with a degree in fine art printmaking from the University of Brighton, before undertaking The Drawing Year postgraduate programme at the Royal Drawing School in 2012–13. Maple has featured in exhibitions at numerous venues in London including Barber & Lopes at the British Art Fair; The Royal Academy; Beers London; Flowers Gallery; Frestonian Gallery; Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery; Albert Studios; and Drawing Room. Venues outside London include Christies New York and Messums Wiltshire. Maple was the winner of the Sunday Times Watercolour Competition 2014 and 2016, and the John Moores Painting Prize 2020. Her exhibition Under a Hot Sun at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2023, was awarded to Maple as part of her prize for winning the latter.

Judging this year had to be carried out online and involved high-spec cameras, screens and speakers. Hurvin Anderson, a painter, was one of the judges. He said the storytelling and characterisation in Maple’s work was both vivid and intriguing. The themes in Maple's work vary in subject from natural forms, trees and landscapes, to figures and buildings. Often drawn from real life or the artist's imagination, she gives each object, person or setting the same treatment, creating a myriad of painterly textures. The urgency with which she depicts subjects is palpable, and her repetitive strokes and marks give each element of every work a different level of depth and detail. I’m not sure if I should admit that I have long been a fan of Kathryn Maple’s work at the start of a review of her show, having followed her artistic career for the last four or five years. Then again, art critique is an inherently subjective activity, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves, or our readers, otherwise. Sandra Penketh, Liverpool’s executive director of galleries and collections care, called Maple’s painting compelling. “The Common is an observation about human interaction, and the way we commune with the natural world, particularly in our cities. It has a special poignancy at this difficult time when the value of our physical and emotional connections to people and places have taken on such a deep resonance.”

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Thank you. Obviously these are not particularly celebratory times but it’s felt so incredible. It’s also felt a bit strange as it’s such a huge prize, and even just to have the painting in the Walker Art Gallery collection alone – that would have been enough! As for my practice changing, no not at all. I guess if anything it’s almost like a bit of a green light to just carry on. Kathryn Maple’s Under a Hot Sun opens on 13 February 2023 and runs until 30 April 2023. For more information, visit: www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/kathrynmaple.

The painting resonates with movement and communality and embodies the deeply social nature of humans,” said Michelle Williams Gamaker, one of the judges. “It fills me with hope and longing to be part of this form of connection again.” The John Moores Painting Prize is organised in partnership with the John Moores Painting Prize Trust . The exhibition is showing as part of Liverpool Biennial 2021, the largest festival of contemporary art in the UK, taking place across the city’s public spaces, galleries and museums from 20 March to 6 June 2021.Selected from almost 3,000 entries, Kathryn’s work will also be acquired by the Walker Art Gallery to join its world-class collection Kathryn will also show images from ‘A Year of Drawings’, a new book and exhibition for which Kathryn made a new drawing everyday between January and December 2022. The works will be shown at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, London in March. However, the exhibition ends up containing an intriguing tension between the French artists who returned after a short time to their homeland and those who welcomed and were welcomed in return by the Victorian art scene. Partly this draws a thematic line between conservative work, which played to the British sensibility, and budding Impressionism, which was beginning to strongly push boundaries on the continent. The auction closes at 9pm, Mon 5th July. However, if a bid is placed in the last two minutes, the auction end time will extend on that lot for an additional two minutes, or until all bidding has ceased. This is called Popcorn Bidding or Bidder Extension and gives all bidders an equal chance of winning. Bid Increments Following Liverpool’s move into Tier 3 of the government’s Covid restrictions in October 2020, for the first time in the history of the Prize judging was all done online. High spec cameras, screens, speakers and AV software allowed judges to appreciate the scale, texture and detail of the works in real time. It also enabled a rich dialogue between the judges, a vital and cherished part of the process. Despite the changes an important fundamental of the competition remained in place with all judging done anonymously, allowing the artworks to speak for themselves.