Kat Lyons

Read a booklet published on the occasion of the exhibition with new writing by Daisy Lafarge and Amber Husain here.

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Herd, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kat Lyons.

Herd sees the American artist bring together a range of cultural, art historical and ecological references as part of her long-term artistic enquiry into the ways in which animals are recast as cultural phenomena. Since moving from a livestock farm to New York in 2021, Lyons has developed an interest in post-naturalist theory, which examines how non-human life has been altered by humans to serve a cultural purpose. For her second solo show with the gallery, Lyons presents new work inflected with these concerns and the symbolisation of animals throughout history, from medieval art, agricultural and technological expansion, medical experimentation, and contemporary visual culture.

The painting Chasm explores the cultural potency of the cow, drawing from Lyons’s time living on the farm, and the bull’s association with masculinity, with reference to the American folk hero Paul Bunyan. The fantastical lumberjack, who cleared hundreds of trees with one fell swoop of his axe, and his companion, Babe the Blue Ox, function for Lyons as symbols of western expansion and the will of Man’s perceived dominion over nature. With its imposing physicality and testicles that allude to Wall Street’s Charging Bull, Lyons’s painting questions the cow’s role in sustaining the perceived viability of the industrialisation of animals and the cultural value of the hypermasculine.

The common honeybee, whose cuteness garners it protection and praise, has become the poster child of the environmental movement, yet the health of ecosystems depends on a vast variety of pollinators. Pollen brings into the foreground the other insects that one might more typically see crawling in the corner of a still life painting as portents of death; here the hidden sources of abundance that exist within the margins come into focus.

The imagery in Final Harvest similarly acknowledges the wide variety of life needed to create a flourishing ecosystem and desirable produce amid our neglected, attenuated agricultural systems. While the fruit-laden trees display a vigorous fecundity, a sense of unease persists – diseased trees often produce an abundance of fruit or seed just before death. Hiemal Arc similarly considers the persistence of the living. Referencing seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish  painting, the primary impulse to thrive is expressed through the bull’s elongated body thrusting skywards through the pig’s belly.

The City (June 6, 2023) refers to the wildfire smoke that engulfed the city of New York in the summer of 2023. Enshrouding the cityscape in a miasmic orange, the painting dramatises the daily experiences of pigeons in urban environments. Pigeons are a synanthropic animal – species that are born wild but live in close association, and benefit from human activities – and yet they are an ambivalent presence in most urban centres, both beloved and despised. The pigeon and the intrusion of climate disaster occuring many miles away collapse the city’s demarcated limits, and any sense of its separateness from ‘wild’ places. The bird appears again in Elegy in the Light; but here, in a busy flutter of wings and feathers, surrounded by a circle of eggs arranged like a clock or a life cycle. 

Finally, in Herd a group of mammals sit as if for a group portrait. Spotlighting the power of language and taxonomical practices, the painting arranges the animals into a group identity, or ‘herd’, while emphasising a jovial display of togetherness. Often depicting numerous miniature versions of her subjects throughout her compositions, Lyons acknowledges that the ‘real’ experiences or emotional lives of animals can only ever be speculated, and will never be known.