Katrine Bobek’s Sound of the Bell Jar, her first solo exhibition with Jack Barrett Gallery, presents a series of paintings that traverse the subconscious, merging dream imagery with emotional realism. Treating the canvas as a theatrical stage, Bobek constructs charged, symbolic landscapes populated with suspended figures, floating faces, and erupting textures. Objects like toy horses, flowers, and musical instruments evoke childhood, myth, and spirituality, shaping scenes that feel both fantastical and emotionally raw.
Blending narrative with abstraction, Bobek draws from Les Nabis and artists like Odilon Redon and Édouard Vuillard, infusing her works with vibrant, pointillist hues and a tactile dry-brush technique. A reinterpretation of Degas’s The Fallen Jockey appears in On the Hillside, anchoring her exploration of performance, fragility, and detachment. The exhibition title signals a tension with contemporary life—a yearning to break from its constraints by conjuring imaginary, symbolic realms that question prevailing norms.
