Blue Ridge

Date2018

MediumAcrylic, sumi ink and collage on paper

Dimensions52 × 76 in. (132.1 × 193 cm) Framed Size: 54 1/2 × 78 in. (138.4 × 198.1 cm)

Credit LineDC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Art Bank Collection

Object numberDCCAH2021.028

ClassificationsPaintings

Locations

Office of the City Administrator (1350 Penn Avenue NW, 513)

DescriptionKatherine Mann’s abstractions arise from ecological and geological cycles, processes of chemical corrosion and natural efflorescence. With roots in traditions of Chinese landscape painting, her monumentally sized paintings evolve a fantastic, abstract vision of the natural world. Blue Ridge asks how a painting can capture flux, abundance, waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms, how it can respond to the pressure we place on our era’s fragile ecosystems. This work sustains tensions between what is artificial and natural, what is chemical and biological, what is organic and inorganic. Mann sees landscape painting as an occasion for radical experimentation and confrontation with the world, in the broadest sense of the term, that sustains us.