Cibrián is thrilled to present greet strangers, the first solo exhibition of Kate Newby in Spain.
greet strangers starts on the Street of Jose Maria Soroa in San Sebastián.
The exhibition’s three glass panes (sing it, greet strangers, and We Float, 2024) embed themselves in the front of the gallery on 12th Street. These works, made at Ateliers Loire, a renowned stained-glass workshop on the outskirts of Paris, are colored following the medieval technique of the jaune d’argent. The yellow-golden light emanating from the works spills onto the street and the gallery’s façade, its intensity shifting with changing weather conditions. Installed high above, the gestures on the glass—shaped through the manipulation of the cast—are visible only from a distance, yet they preserve tangible traces of the artist’s touch. Depending on the sun’s position, the works sporadically illuminate the threshold of the exhibition, a permeable area that marks a beginning and an end, both inside and outside. Kate Newby delicately works with the architecture, creating apertures where the circulating air and the ever-changing lights are as important as the gestures, big or small.
Once inside the exhibition space, the viewer is confronted with horizontal lines composed of bronzes and unglazed ceramics, like wind chimes, held together with a multitude of ropes and threads. The materials are concise and rough so that the attention is not scattered. Vertical lines of glazed tile ceramics on the back wall rise to the ceiling. Newby manipulates, fires, and arranges elements from the natural world and built environment, creating site-responsive installations often as a constellation of humble gestures that would have been otherwise overlooked.
The horizontal and vertical intersect at the center of greet strangers, like the mesh of a net skillfully woven by the artist, in which several geographies collide: Tokyo, Texas (where the artist lives and works), and the Basque Country. The works on display echo the various places they have been produced and shown, inviting the viewer to pay close attention to their immediate environment. Kate Newby focuses on how the shape cuts through the spaces it interacts with and how it inhabits them, even temporarily.
Kate Newby (b. 1979, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, lives and works in Floresville, Texas) has exhibited widely and internationally. She received her Doctorate of Fine Art in 2015 from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. Recent solo exhibitions include: Hours in wind, curated by Jane Devery, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2024), anything, anything, curated by Juliane Bischoff, Klosterruine, Berlin (2024), What a great year for music, Marfa Book Co., Marfa, TX ( 2023), So close, come on, The Sunday Painter, London (2022), COLD WATER, Fine Arts, Sydney (2021); Nothing in my life feels big enough, Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019); Wild was the night, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne (2019); A puzzling light and moving, lumber room, Portland, OR (2019); I can’t nail the days down, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2018); and All the stuff you already know, The Sunday Painter, London (2018). She has been included in group exhibitions at Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo (2024), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2023), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2019); 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg (2018); and SculptureCenter, NY (2017), among others. In 2012, she won the Walters Prize, New Zealand’s largest contemporary art prize, and in 2019 Newby was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. Newby was recently awarded the 13th edition of the Ettore e Ines Fico Prize at Artissima 2022. Kate has undertaken residencies at The Chinati Foundation (2017), Artpace (2017), Fogo Island (2013), and the International Studio & Curatorial Program ISCP (2012).