PATRON is proud to announce Caroline Kent: The Sentimental Hand, our second solo exhibition with the Chicago-based artist. The Sentimental Hand results from a year in which Kent’s focus returned to honing in on the building blocks of her practice, starting with cut paper forms–the elementary facet of her practice. Celebrating the role of the artist’s own hand as foundational in each stage of her creative process, the exhibition unites four bodies of work across which Kent has been concurrently working for the past year.
The Sentimental Hand takes a cue from, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s text, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. The book synthesizes how our senses play a sincere role in memory, creativity, and how the physical act of making enacts how the body “thinks” through materials, tools, and process. For Kent, this is enacted in her foundational activity of cutting shapes out of paper, to making maquettes, to trimming the edges of her large canvases by hand. The paintings are at times assembled by making compositions first from paper, then translated to canvas, Belgian linen, or cast into a shape.
For Kent, language is a system that is built on shape and form, and increasingly, though acquired knowledge, as a sign or a symbol. Since 2013, her expansive paintings on black gessoed ground function as the origin site of language, cosmologies where meaning is yet to be defined. These carefully composed paintings constellate Kent’s visual language. Built up through gradients of gray, purple shadow forms simultaneously emerging and receding from the black ground, Kent sets into motion a limitless catalyst of spatial poetics through geometric fields of bright color, subtle, gestural letters and signs. By replacing “thinking” for “sentimental,” Kent doesn’t eschew the analytical, but illuminates her devotion to the act of painting.
The Sentimental Hand is constructed through translations of Kent’s visual language across media. In paintings on paper, Kent excerpts vignettes from her paintings on canvas, allowing the forms to flow intuitively. Where the paintings on canvas act as abstract novels, the works on paper are short stories, a format of decisive gestures, existing outside of expected narrative arc and structure. Diptych and triptych wooden frames hold Belgian linen paintings framed between walnut wood panels with inlaid dyed cast cement. One-act plays, Kent utilizes the natural weaves of the Belgian linen material as the space to explore the representation of multi-dimensional space on a single plane–inspired by her ongoing research into architecture. Shapes traced back to gestural marks originally emergent across black paintings and works on paper are built up of brightly colored forms to create abstracted architectural spaces, and then echoed as physical recessed spaces in the walnut. By using her poetic titles as stage directions, the viewer is invited in, mood is evoked, and possible actions alluded to.
Throughout the exhibition, the galleries themselves become animated as figure / ground relationships that theatrically extend the site of her compositions, and re-enact the natural material relationships that originate in Kent’s studio. “…I can work on the wall on something large and then I can move immediately and look over to the table… when I’m making works on paper, I have them out in the room together, because they start to speak to one another. What happens on a larger canvas ends up happening on a work on paper. They all end up getting influenced.” Drawings from Kent’s paintings are extracted as punctuations, cut wooden shapes indicate scene changes, or, cast in cement inanimate beings, actors in the vignette dramas. Returning to these abstract shapes, each originating as hand-cut paper pieces by the artist’s hand, Kent practices how her language moves out in the room, and around the room. This space of dynamic, physical play, holds a unique power– to create metaphor for how a language becomes embedded in and subtly shapes the parameters of our environment…real or imagined.
CAROLINE KENT (b. 1975, Sterling, IL) lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received an MFA from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN and a BA from Illinois State University in Normal, IL.
Select solo exhibitions include: Caroline Kent: The Sentimental Hand (2024) PATRON, Chicago, IL ; Caroline Kent: Kindred, Wright Museum of Art, Beloit University, Beloit, WI; A short play about watching shadows move across the room (2023) Queens Museum, Queens, NY; This space for correspondence (2023), Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, NY; An Improvisation of Form (2022), Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Space | Shadow | Script (2022), PATRON, Chicago, IL; XYZ: Alphabetical Ruptures and Reformations (2022), Kinosaito, Verplanck, NY; The sounds among us (2022), Art Wall at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Chicago Works: Caroline Kent (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; What the stars can’t tell us (2021), University Galleries at Illinois State University, Normal, IL; Proclamations from the Deep (2021), Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, NY; and Victoria/Veronica: The figment between us (2021), Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago, IL.
Select group exhibitions include: The 50th An Anniversary Exhibition (2025), SMART Museum, Chicago, IL; Flow States : La Triennial 2024 (2024), El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; The Mask of Prosperity (2024), Gallery 400 at The University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL; Sensory Poetics: Collecting Abstraction, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Artist’s Eye (2022), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley, CA; NEW at NOMA: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art (2022), New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; LatinXAmerican (2021), DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Constructed Mysteries (2021), Bethel University Art Galleries, St. Paul, MN, Travels to: Baugh Center for the Visual Arts, Belton, TX, Boger Gallery, Point Lookout, MO, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL, and De Pree Gallery, Holland, MI; Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago (2020), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; all this and not ordinary – the difference is spreading (2020), The Marxhausen Gallery of Art at Concordia University, Seward, NE; and Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection (2019), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.
Her work is included in the public collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; DePaul University, Chicago, IL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hill Art Foundation, New York, NY; Joyner/Guiffrida Collection; Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN.
