Caitlin Keogh
January 14, 2025
Painter Caitlin Keogh’s most recent show at Bortolami Gallery in New York, “Procession,” centers on a suite of seven contiguous paintings. These intricate and allusory canvases are made up of translations of art historical, design, and commercial sources ranging from Cranach and Beardsley to the Wiener Werkstätte and Harper's. At once fascinating and bemusing, these compositions are structured like a dance. It’s no surprise, then, that we begin our conversation talking about Keogh’s childhood study of ballet. We talk about the discipline and how it’s essentially an art form of interpretation rather than expression—of objecthood and subjecthood.
We discuss Dolly Parton, Elizabeth Murray, country music, and Keogh’s use of the female nude. How her background in commercial illustration has influenced her work, and her fascination with artists like Magritte and Juan Gris, who did commercial work to support themselves. Her practice of collecting images herself and from friends, and how that translates into studio practice. For this work she really wanted to make a show that was about process—a dreamlike intuitive cobbling together of images, of “performers”, to create a parade marching across a life-size two dimensional space. It’s a great conversation with great music!
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Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.
- Plie, Lynn Stanford, 1983
- If Teardrops Were Pennies, Porter Wagoner, Dolly Parton, 1973
- My Tennessee Mountain Home, Dolly Parton, 1973
- Fist City, Loretta Lynn, 1968
- Amigo's Guitar, Kitty Wells, 1959
- Pauvre Martin, Barbara, 1969
- After Laughter (Comes Tears), Wendy Rene, 1964
- Salad Days, Young Marble Giants, recording released 2007
- Seven Words, Weyes Blood, 2016
- Solace, Myriam Gendron, 2014
- Love No More - 2024 Remaster, The Durutti Column, 1989
- It Is What It Is, Blood Orange, 2013
- Jackie, Sinéad O'Connor, 1987
- La festa d'Imeneo: Vaghi amori, grazie amate (Ed. Sanderson), Nicola Porpora, Cecilia Bartoli, Il Giardino Armonico, Giovanni Antonini, 2019
- The Tinderbox (of A Heart), Cocteau Twins, 1983
- Only You, Yaz, 2023
- Norman fucking Rockwell, Lana Del Rey, 2019
- Catherine, PJ Harvey, 1998
- Freight train, Elizabeth Cotten, 1989
- Reverence, Lynn Stanford, 1983
Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982 in Anchorage, Alaska) lives and works in New York. Her paintings were recently included in New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century at BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA. In 2021, Keogh completed a mural in the city of Holbaek, Denmark in conjunction with Holbaek Art. Keogh participated in Art Basel Parcours 2019, Basel, Switzerland, and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Melas Papadopoulos, Athens, Greece; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. Her work has also been exhibited at Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France; MoMA Warsaw, Poland; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany; the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows, NY; and The Church, Sag Harbor, NY.
Her work is represented in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul; the Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence.