13 Facts About Kathleen Kucka

Kathleen Kucka was born on 1962 and is an American visual artist whose practice includes abstract paintings, works on paper and prints.

Kathleen Kucka is known for work that combines a conceptual approach with unique, sometimes unpredictable processes of mark-making such as the burning of canvas, pouring paint, and sewing.

Kathleen Kucka has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Columbia Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art and the Drawing Center, among other venues.

Kathleen Kucka's work belongs to permanent art collections including those of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Borusan Contemporary, and Weatherspoon Art Museum.

Kathleen Kucka earned a BFA degree from Cooper Union in 1984.

Kathleen Kucka's work explores image- and mark-making through unconventional physical interactions and transformations that balance intention against largely unpredictable or uncontrollable forces such as extreme heat or gravity.

Kathleen Kucka's processes have included sewing layers of canvas or fabric onto painted pieces, pouring paint, and burning paper and canvas with various household implements.

Kathleen Kucka has often structured her compositions in linear, gridded or circular patterns that both invoke modernist movements such as minimalism and call to mind themes of natural destruction and regeneration.

Kathleen Kucka's "burn" works are inspired by twentieth-century artists such as Lucio Fontana and the German Zero Group, minimalists who sought to resurrect art by first destroying or effacing canvasses.

In 2013, Kathleen Kucka returned to burning canvas and paper, eventually setting up a converted-barn studio in Falls Village, Connecticut, which allowed for more controlled burning.

Kathleen Kucka makes the burns in kinetic concentric, linear or swirling patterns, as in Field of Happening.

Kathleen Kucka's work belongs to the permanent collections of the Arkansas Art Center, Birmingham Museum of Art, Borusan Contemporary, Museum of Modern Art Franklin Furnace Archive, Norton Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Werner Kramarsky Collection, as well as to corporate collections.

Kathleen Kucka has received artist residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.