painting

Natasha Bowdoin (b. 1981, West Kennebunk, ME) is a visual artist working in the space between painting and installation, interested in stretching the physical boundaries of painting and exploring notions of painting as site. Her collage inspired, large-scale installations investigate the potential intersections of the visual and the literary while reimagining our relationship to the natural world. Her work has been presented widely in solo exhibitions including most recently with In the Night Garden, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Sideways to the Sun, Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX; Maneater, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), North Adams, MA; and Lunar Spring, Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Paper Routes: Women to Watch, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Paper Art, CODA Museum, Apeldoorn, Netherlands; paperless, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and A Torrent of Words: Contemporary Art and Language, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI. Bowdoin received her BA from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, in Classics and Studio Art and her MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. She has been awarded numerous artist residencies and fellowships, including the Core Artist-in-Residence Program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2008-2010); the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (2013); the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Artist-in-Residence Program, Omaha (2012); and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2007). She is an Associate Professor in Painting and Drawing at Rice University in Houston, TX where she lives and works.

The multiple facets of cultural identity have been the central content of my artistic practice. To conceptualize my art, I studied the ideas of grotesque and abjection. I also closely looked at the Superflat movement, which is an art movement of the 1990's in Japan. Takashi Murakami, who is a founder of the movement, and his work were influential to my art. The outcome of the research is reflected in a large painting with dimensions of roughly seven by thirteen feet. The painting portrays the convolution and exuberant energy of cultural plurality. The painting contains numerous cultural imageries. Some of the references are not readable for all people. Most will vary in interpretation depending on the on-looker; much like myself. How I tried to come to terms with my identity as a foreigner was projected in the large chaotic painting. How people read it is not up to me anymore.