Kim Booker: [WG.127] The Sadness of Beautiful Things

Working in acrylic on large canvases, Kim Booker uses colour, gesture and figure to express the psychology of the female experience. Dynamic strokes of charcoal and scrawls of colour expand upon the canvas reflecting both the physicality of painting and the emotions of the painter.

This new body of work features Booker’s distinctive visceral scratches and smudges, marking a negotiation between the drawn image and abstract colour. Charcoal, representing both literal and psychological darkness, stands in dialogue with colour, as Booker navigates between them. Her use of materials is often messy and unconstrained, employing an expansive range of mark making that allows Booker to move back and forth between the light and the dark. Working with her hands, elements are scrubbed out, obscured and over-painted as Booker removes the barriers that come between her and the canvas.

By imposing both herself and the feminine into the images of the Renaissance and medieval period, Booker reimagines the classical through a female gaze. Often depicted as bodies in nature, her work mediates between the dichotomies of the female image and experience; chaos versus control, thought versus emotion, and beauty versus shame. Confessional and reflective, Booker's work gives voice to the brutalities faced by the female body, her work serving as both an antidote and challenge to the severity of our world.

Kim Booker (b.1983) lives and works in London. Booker graduated with a BFA from City and Guilds of London Art School in 2019 and has since exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including New York, Cologne, Paris and South Korea.