Photography courtesy of Rachel Darke

Kate Bickmore

Kate Bickmore (b. Albany, New York) paints colorful, hyper-realistic florascapes inspired by her experience of the natural world as a highly sensitive queer woman. In Bickmore’s paintings, the bodily, large-scale plants recede and emerge from the surface of the canvas, creating an immersive world that’s at once realistic and fantastic. Kate explores her queerness via painting expansive flowers. She approaches her work as a sensual and intimate experience, akin to depicting or exploring a lover’s body. These compositions contain crevices, flesh, hair, shadows, limitless voids, and often exhibit both yonic and phallic parts.

As Kate sees it, flowers are not passive, static objects, and cannot be contained. They have limitless growth, are infinitely evolving, growing, and becoming in relationship to other living things. There is an entropic energy and continuous movement to these flora. A web of plants and floral parts recede, emerge, and interact with one another, containing boundless colors, textures, and abstracted organic layers, while creating windows, voids, continuous, circular movement, and rhizomatic growth across the canvas. The space of the canvas is boundary-less: flowers grow out from atmosphere and beyond canvas, in front of the viewer.

Kate Bickmore was born in Albany, New York and resides between London, United Kingdom and Rockland, Maine. She received her MFA in Fine Arts from the Royal College of Arts. Recent group exhibitions of Bickmore’s work include Fantastic Landscapes at Double Q Gallery, Hong Kong (2023) and In the Heat of the Night and Horizon Line at Andrew Reed Gallery (2023), in New York and Miami, respectively. Bickmore’s work is currently exhibited in After Rainfall, a solo exhibition at Andrew Reed Gallery, on view through Saturday, January 6th.