Kimberly Trowbridge, “Field and Figure”

By Matthew Kangas

J. Rinehart Gallery, Seattle

Exhibition continues through June 26, 2024

Kimberly Trowbridge, “Empire of Flora After Poussin,” 2023, oil on paper on panel, 16 x 20”.

All photos courtesy of J. Rinehart Gallery, Seattle

Kimberly Trowbridge is in a crisis, as her current exhibit attests. Whether a split studio personality or a case of aesthetic schizophrenia, “Field and Figure” rightly separates two bodies of work. But the title misrepresents their progression from one to the other, regardless of her wordy artist’s statements. The differences may be clear to her, but to this viewer it feels more like a two-person show: beautiful landscapes accompanied by re-statements of famous Baroque and Rococo paintings by Boucher, Fragonard, and Poussin, starkly juxtaposed with cold geometric studies, paintings, and cast-plaster tabletop knickknacks ranging from five to 14 inches in height.

What happened? To turn to the artist’s extensive written defense does not help but, indeed, clouds the matter. To further complicate things, six oils of life-class female nudes intrude, tugging the entire body of work backwards in time, miles away from anything contemporary — social, political, or gender-challenging. They hew closer to fair-and-square academic classes, several of which Trowbridge has taught, most tellingly, at the Gage Academy of Art, a bastion of conservative instruction for retired amateurs and high-tech workers with time on their hands. Thus, “Field and Figure” could be a three-person show: landscapes and art-historical riffs; geometric sketches with tiny blocks and toys; and the utterly conventional female nudes that do nothing to challenge the “male gaze” forever associated with the work of vanguard feminist art historians like Linda Nochlin.

Kimberly Trowbridge, “Hemlock in the Moss Garden,” 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 72”

Where is Trowbridge coming from and where is she going? Her graduate work at the University of Washington led her to leading realist and female nude painter Norman Lundin. All this was preceded by a junior-year abroad at University of Kent in Canterbury. It must be said that her kind of art, featuring classical training, conventional genres, and diminutive sizes, is still considered respectable in the UK.

Kimberly Trowbridge, “Tieton Field Painting,” 2023, oil on paper on panel, 16 x 20”

The biggest and best of the landscapes, “Hemlock in the Moss Garden” (2024) grew literally out of the artist’s celebrated residency at the Bloedel Reserve, a former private mansion surrounded by landscaped gardens. This was capped by her most experimental show to date, “Into the Garden,” at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in 2021. Fragmented, gridded, and otherwise dismantled, the trees, shrubs and bushes took on skewed, off-kilter perceptions that pushed Trowbridge’s risk-taking further away from the safe landings she has settled on with the new works. Smaller, exquisite landscapes such as “Joshua Tree Spring” (2023), “Mullein Fence Post” and the “Big Horn Mountains” (2022) are the result of her much-touted plein air approach, rubbing close to her idol, Paul Cézanne, but without his dry and magisterial paint-handling. For Trowbridge, the brushwork can go any which way, applied with bravado, carefully daubed on, but rarely anchoring shapes into objecthood, like Cézanne’s mountains and trees. “Tieton Field Painting” (2023), another oil on paper, comes closer to abstraction with its four quarters of separated imagery united within the same view: woodpile, fence, dwelling and tree.

Kimberly Trowbridge, “Mojave Spring,” 2023, oil on paper on panel, 20 x 16”

They point toward the big “Hemlock in the Moss Garden” and the new “Oracle Tree II (Big Leaf Maple), January 2020-24,” her tallest undertaking, and her biggest failure. Shoving the black trunk up the center, surrounding it with twisted pale blue and gray branches, it reduces the scene to design components, i.e., a restricted black-and-white, gray-and-blue color scheme thought common to Cubism, but without any of the historical movement’s graduated shifts in tone.

Trowbridge settles on illustrations of abstraction here, with “Oracle Tree,” an assembly-line display of eight tiny gouaches called “Figure Collages,” and the 48 plaster-and-concrete angled objects yearning to be connected to the life-class models. They do not work as self-contained or sequential stages of Cubism, nor do they convince as autonomous objects when grouped, as is the case in “Garden Friezes” (2022-2024) or the “Legs and Torso Fragments” (2024).

Kimberly Trowbridge, “The Shepherdess after Fragonard,” 2023, oil on linen on panel, 9 x 12”

That leaves the five medium-size (16 to 48 inches) art-historical quotation paintings. In these, Trowbridge is onto something more contemporary despite their throw-back sources. After all, if Larry Rivers, Robert Colescott, and Andy Warhol could do it with humor and panache, so can Trowbridge. These are timid beginnings but show great promise: “Bathers after Boucher,” “Day over Night after Fragonard” (both 2021), “Empire of Flora after Poussin” (two versions, 2023), and “The Shepherdess after Fragonard” (also 2023). All are effervescent cartoons of gigantic Old Masters that Trowbridge deflates with a light touch and shrunken size. Such travels into a past world of imaginary pleasure are surely the way to go.

Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas