Catherine Baumhauer

My work is the result of a process-driven practice, which fuses traditional art mediums with found materials such as pieces of refuse (metal, styrofoam, scrap papers, fabric) or natural elements (bark, sand, etc). This mixed-media approach achieves a rich visual dynamic and establishes connections to my surrounding environment, bolstering certain metaphors represented by the detritus of urban experience. I’m interested in the duality between humankind’s reverence for nature and its role in undermining the natural world—a contrast that is clearly visible everywhere especially living in an urban environment. I also often find myself drawn to the question of what it means to be a woman in modern society, one who is cast in many roles: mother, wife, daughter, sister, self. The recurring female figures inhabiting my work are visual manifestations of this inquiry into both my own identity as a woman and the broader notion of female identity at this moment in history.

The concept of duality is central to much of my work, both formally and conceptually. The textured layers I create generate binary relationships between representational imagery and abstraction, whereby such figures and/or forms emerge that represent oppositional forces—p...

BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago
MFA California Institute of the Arts
Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts

Group Show, Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA (upcoming)
Solo exhibit, Compass Gallery, El Segundo, CA June 2019
Solo exhibit, Hawthorne Arts Complex, CA June 2019
'The Other Half of the Sky', Girls Club, Miami, FL May 2019
'Water + Wood', Resin Gallery, Hermosa Beach, CA Feb 2019
'Indivisible', Resin Gallery, Hermosa Beach, CA Sept 2018
The Stand Gallery, Asheville, NC May 2018
The Stand Gallery, Asheville, NC May 2017
Ananda, Asheville, NC Sept 2017