Maya Frodeman Gallery is pleased to present Seeing Silence, an exhibition of paintings by Kathryn Lynch. The title reflects Lynch’s understanding of painting as a wordless realm—one in which observation, intuition, and feeling take precedence over language.
Lynch’s paintings begin with something real: a landscape, a street, a ship, a face. Her paintings move between the observed and the imagined, transforming specific places and fleeting moments into atmospheric images that feel at once familiar and elusive. “I am painting the poetry of place rather than the place,” Lynch says. “It’s a boat anywhere, it’s a sky for everyone. It’s nowhere and everywhere.”
Lynch responds to the world around her, allowing each painting to develop through an intuitive exchange between herself and the canvas. She does not begin with a predetermined outcome. Instead, each work demands something different, and she follows the painting until the conversation is finished. The process can be quick or painstaking and is anything but passive. Lynch describes it less as meditation than as giving birth—a sustained effort to bring the canvas to life, to make it breathe on its own.
Across landscapes and portraits, Lynch distills moments of everyday experience into paintings that are elusive yet deeply felt. Silence, for her, creates space for what cannot be fully explained or fully known, allowing intuition and possibility to take precedence over language. Rather than offering a fixed meaning, the paintings invite the viewer into their own quiet exchange. Lynch hopes they can exist beyond a particular time or place, speaking to the shared experience of being alive.
Kathryn Lynch was born and raised in Philadelphia. She received her undergraduate degree from William Smith College in Geneva, NY, and an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. She was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting in 2018. She has been invited to Skowhegan, Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center. Since earning her MFA, Lynch has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad. Her works are in the permanent collections of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA and Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, as well as many corporate collections, including Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and the Millennium Art Collection in the Ritz Carlton, Battery Park, in NYC. The artist lives in Catskill, NY, and works in a curated artist campus called Foreland.
