Steve Turner is pleased to present Grown Woman, a solo exhibition by Milwaukee-based Kate Klingbeil which features new anthropomorphic paintings and sculptures that she created upon her return to Wisconsin after the onset of Covid. Her paintings depict fantastical underground landscapes and complex ecosystems that draw upon her upbringing in the rural Midwest and which represent the dark side of her mind. She has an idiosyncratic painting process that involves the construction of painted passages on plastic that she later removes and afxes to her complicated compositions of above and below ground landscapes.

The layering of these painted elements yields deeply textured, sculptural paintings. Grown Woman also introduces a new aspect of Klingbeil’s practice–cast brass and iron sculpture–that she made during her recent residency in the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. They depict many of the same root characters that are in her paintings, but in casting molten metals, Klingbeil gets even closer to the underground world that is at the core of her practice.

Klingbeil (born 1990, Grosse Pointe, Michigan) received a BFA at California College of the Arts (2012). She had a solo exhibition at SPRING/BREAK, New York with Field Projects (2020); a two-person show with Rebecca Ness at Monya Rowe, New York (2019) and has been in group exhibitions at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2020); Nevven Gallery, Gothenburg (2019); Andrew Edlin, New York (2019); Paul Kasmin, New York (2018) and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2017). This is her first solo exhibition at Steve Turner.