About Kate Pincus-Whitney

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

Just as a Coca-Cola bottle in Tom Wesselmann’s Still life series is understood not simply as a coca cola bottle, but instead an icon of American identity or as in Morandi, a custard cup is not simply a cup- it is holding space as Madonna and Child, Kate Pincus-Whitney’s maximalist, feminist, and unapologetically boisterous work is not only about the reality of the still life or the things painted but about the specificity of life and its cosmology. Mapping the movement of culture through histories of spices, wax candles, or fine white china bowls, her tablescapes are a place of narrative portraiture--sometimes a sort of shrine, sometimes a stage or a commons. Sometimes they are a place for formal or historical political acts of agency, and sometimes, she simply wishes to capture the essence of a person through the objects they consume or surround themselves with. Exploring the duality of the sacred and profane the still life is the stage for it all.

Raised in the kitchen by a single mother and grandmother, her experience of identity is deeply entrenched in the sharing of the meals and the theater of the dinner table. We all must eat. Investigating modern and historical modes of consumption, food acts as both symbols and icons of psychological hunger – hunger for connection, meaning, belonging and celebrating the divine comedy of the dinner table.

Kate Pincus-Whitney is represented by Fredericks and Freiser. She is a recent painting graduate of Rhode Island School of Design. She is a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend Yale Norfolk in 2015. She has been an active Artist Ambassador for the Kennedy Center in Washington Dc. Her debut European solo show Paradise à la Carte opens September 2021 at GNYP Gallery, Berlin, Germany.