60 x 50cm 

2021

Catherine Lette is a practicing painter living and working in South London. With a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martin’s College, she has also participated in the Turps Off-site Painting Program from 2019-2022. In 2021 Lette was shortlisted for the Jackson’s Painting Prize, published in Art Maze Mag Issue 21, selected for Auc Art’s ‘Ones to Watch’ sale and participated in numerous group shows and curator’s selections. Her work is held in private collections in the UK and internationally.

Artist Statement

In today’s multi-layered environment we can be simultaneously in one space and another, embodied and disembodied. Inspired by current events, Lette composes figures dissembled in relation to her gaze, framed by the real and virtual spaces we occupy. Her practice questions the impact of contemporary life upon body and mind and how that might be manifested in a portrayal of the figure. Drawing is at the heart of her practice, a daily activity that underpins her work and shapes her paintings, populating them with the vernacular that surrounds her.

The works showing at Hera are a result of exploring the impact of the global pandemic restrictions, considering the complex nature of containment with the binary outcome of safety and risk. Drawing from life, memory and photography her compositions are populated with the figures around her moving between a state of painted real and unreal. The figures are often broken down or distorted in a parody of their own activities, mixing humour and irony with an underlying question about social anxiety. Lette sees the body as a fluid entity that is both projected upon and viewed introspectively, she would like the figures in her paintings to reflect this duality.

A self-confessed magpie with a love of painting, Lette’s influences are wide ranging from the Venetian High Renaissance to contemporary artists such as Dana Schutz and Christina Quarles. Growing up in Cornwall but now living in London she enjoys the experience of both rural and urban life that feeds into her artwork.