Katemccormackartist.com Website Review

Hotel Moskva Reception, 2018, Oil on canvas 190 x 120 cm, SOLD The Alexey Shchusev Suite, 2018 Oil on canvas, 190 x 120 cm, SOLD The Saveliev and Stapran Room (twin share), 2018, Oil on canvas 190 x 120 cm, SOLD The Yuri Gagarin Mezzanine Dining Room, 2018, Oil on canvas, 220 x 190cm, SOLD Always sit left (you never know when you might have to attack the taxi driver), 2018 Queer space antechamber, 2018 Oil on canvas, 120 x 190 cm, SOLD A young, queer, solo traveller follows a hand traced map to see her beloved art-textbook reproductions in person. On a one-year odyssey traversing Europe from east to west and to North Africa, her life changes irrevocably as exposure to the majesty of cultures and landscapes is suddenly truncated by violence that leaves her with brain injury, retrograde amnesia and PTSD. When the artist travelled in 1994 to Russia, home to her pre and post-revolutionary heroes of art and literature she stayed at the Hotel Moskva. The vibe of the early 80s brochure she studied so carefully at Harvey World Travel, Goulburn was not, however, what she found at the famous hotel. Instead of the richly ornate, almost kitsch aesthetic depicted in the pamphlet, she found a near empty, stark and cavernous interior – a perfect echo chamber to the edgy post-perestroika ganglands outside in Red Square. These thumbnail images of McCormack’s backpacking dreams at Hotel Moskva eventually became fragmented memories; rooms of involuntary recall that played Hotel Moskva is Kate McCormack’s first solo exhibition of paintings tracing at once the glitches of memory whilst mapping post-soviet colour, movement and aesthetics. Collapsing the spaces between personal memory and enormous social upheaval, McCormack’s large scale paintings (part architectural drafts, part visual travel diary) are deliberately moved off grid, painstakingly rendering each slippage and blur. The result is interiors literally dripping with the colour of uncertainty. ABOUT Kate McCormack’s first solo show of