ARTIST STATEMENT

I make abstract mixed-media paintings that explore memory, transformation, and the beauty that can emerge from what has been weathered, disrupted, or changed.

My work often begins without a fixed destination. I build surfaces intuitively through layers of acrylic, collage, graphite, watercolor, wax, and other materials—adding, obscuring, scraping away, and revealing what lies beneath. I’m interested in the tension between opposing forces: beauty and decay, order and chaos, stillness and motion, loss and becoming.

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to the marks that time and experience leave behind—the patina of an aging surface, a fragment of an old letter, a scar, an imperfect edge. Rather than something to erase, I see these traces as evidence of having lived. There is beauty in distress, and possibility in what remains.

Painting is an act of excavation for me. I follow what feels alive, allowing unexpected shapes, histories, memories, and contradictions to surface. Some paintings carry fragments of my own past; others emerge from a more intuitive conversation with color, form, and material.

Ultimately, my work is about transformation: how we are continually altered by experience, what we carry forward, what we leave behind, and the possibility of discovering something unexpected—and even beautiful—in what we become.

BIO

Kate Kolbrener approaches painting as an act of excavation. Through layers of where acrylic, charcoal, collage, wax, crayon, pencil, and other mixed media she builds and uncovers surfaces that mirror the ways memory, grief, beauty, and resilience accumulate over a lifetime. Rather than illustrating experience, her abstract mixed media paintings embody it—inviting viewers into richly textured spaces where ruin and renewal coexist, and where what has been buried can be transformed.

Working intuitively, Kolbrener allows each painting to evolve through accumulation, erasure, and revelation. Marks are covered, scraped back, and rediscovered, echoing the ways identity itself is continually rewritten. Fragments of geometry, stitched lines, luminous color, and organic forms suggest histories that remain present even as they are reimagined, creating works that invite reflection, connection, and unexpected moments of wonder.

Originally trained in metalsmithing and graphic design, Kolbrener earned a BFA from the University of Michigan School of Art. After decades balancing creative pursuits with family life and a successful marketing career, she returned fully to the studio, where painting became both an artistic practice and a form of inquiry into healing, resilience, and renewal. She continues to deepen her practice through artist residencies, immersive study, and ongoing exploration of abstraction.

Her work has been exhibited at the Sonoran Arts League and The Finer Arts Gallery in Cave Creek, Arizona, and featured in the Bower Willo Project in Phoenix. Throughout her practice, Kolbrener remains committed to the belief that creativity is an essential force for transformation. Each painting becomes an excavation—not simply of memory, but of possibility—making space for beauty, resilience, and the quiet act of becoming.