In this video, we attend the opening reception for Cathy Ward’s solo exhibition at The Good Luck Gallery in Chinatown, Los Angeles. On display are a selection of scratchboard drawings. It’s her first solo show in the United States.
The Good Luck Gallery opened in 2014 and is owned and curated by Paige Wery, who for six years was the publisher of Artillery art magazine. The gallery exclusively showcases self-taught art.
Cathy Ward at The Good Luck Gallery, Los Angeles. Opening, September 5, 2015.
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The mesmerizing scratchboard drawings of Cathy Ward pull the viewer into a realm of dizzyingly complicated beauty that exudes both spirituality and sensuality. Beginning as depictions of hair, these etherealized tracts of psychic space assume cosmic dimensions, arrived at by an unusual process of scraping at a surface of black India ink to uncover layers of white china clay.
Although she attended college Ward has been embraced by the visionary art community owing to the intuitive nature, sheer power and undeniable originality of her work. The artist’s background includes a harsh and affecting convent education under the Sisters of Mercy, a turbulent psychological history, and formative years spent on the margins of British youth culture in the company of punks, pagans and bikers.
With these starkly swirling masses and intricate atmospheric disturbances, Ward has created a highly personal and immersive realm of vibrant spectral abstraction, quite unlike anything else in the world of art, or any other world. She has exhibited widely in Europe & internationally. This, her first solo show in the United States, should definitely be viewed as a major event.