Katherine Boxall: Trace of Being

McLennon Pen Co. is pleased to present Trace of Being, our first solo exhibition with Katherine Boxall, a Canadian-born artist based in Austin, Texas. Bringing together a dozen large-scale and a few smaller-scale abstract paintings, the exhibition offers a focused yet expansive view of Boxall’s materially driven practice—one that insists on painting as both an event and a residue, a site where gesture, surface, and time converge.

Working with acrylic, spray paint, pastel, oil, household paint, and clear gesso, Boxall constructs compositions that are at once immediate and considered. Her paintings exude a physical conviction—marks are laid down with urgency, yet held in careful balance by an underlying compositional intelligence. Color and material accumulate, erode, and reassert themselves, creating surfaces that feel lived-in rather than resolved, as if the paintings are documents of sustained negotiation rather than singular moments of expression.

For Trace of Being, Boxall presents four interrelated bodies of work. One group explores the blunt utility and chromatic flatness of household paint, foregrounding its resistance to traditional painterly hierarchy. Another centers on her signature use of clear gesso, often overlaid with white spray paint, a process that both veils and activates the surface, allowing earlier gestures to flicker through like afterimages. A third body incorporates a scar or relief—physical interruptions in the picture plane that function as records of pressure, removal, or insistence. The final group integrates drawing directly into the painted field, collapsing distinctions between line and mass, planning and improvisation. In several works, Boxall introduces red spray paint, a chromatic intrusion that heightens tension and amplifies the bodily charge of the compositions. Following this approach, Boxall reflects on her process in her own words:

“If representational painting memorializes something or someone, then for me working in abstraction is about memorializing a series of moments. Each intervention on the canvas becomes a timestamp that can never be duplicated. A series of quiet negotiations between myself and the blank canvas—using washes, smears, sprays, and pours—creates a physical record of emotion, feeling, and presence. The marks that remain permanent emerge through a process of removing and reimagining; what has been taken away ultimately informs what is present.”

Boxall’s work is in dialogue with key figures in postwar and contemporary abstraction. Like Jules Olitski, she treats paint as an atmospheric force, capable of dispersal and saturation rather than containment. Her engagement with spray paint recalls Katharina Grosse’s radical expansion of painting into space and environment, while her attention to gravity, flow, and the performative release of paint resonates with Pat Steir’s investigations into chance and control. Yet Boxall’s paintings remain distinctly her own—less about spectacle or transcendence than about persistence, touch, and the cumulative trace of decision-making.

In Trace of Being, painting is not positioned as an image to be decoded, but as an index of presence. Each work bears evidence of its own making: gestures that linger, surfaces that remember, and materials that refuse neutrality. Together, the paintings propose abstraction as a way of thinking through embodiment—how one occupies space, how one leaves marks, and how meaning accrues through repetition, resistance, and return.

Additional exhibition and programming details will be announced in the coming weeks.

For press inquiries or to schedule a preview, please contact:
info@mclennonpenco.com

ABOUT THE ARTIST: