The Brooklyn Rail

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard and with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.

Here Edwin Abbott Abbott’s narrator is introducing his 1884 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a satirical critique of Victorian society, but his remarks also serve, ironically, as an ideal description of Kate Shepherd’s spectacular current show. To Abbott’s geometric fantasy Shepherd adds color, sometimes as a field her figures populate, sometimes itself the subject of her work. But unlike Abbott, who creates a utopia (etymologically, a “no-place”) that his readers visit by reading his book, Shepherd brings her geometric imaginings into our world in three main modes: nine oil and enamel on panel works (all 52 by 46 inches), three stained plywood floor sculptures, and ten watercolors (all 18 by 15 inches).

In this show Shepherd also includes Ever (2024), the first wall painting she has ever shown in New York. This ephemeral piece could be replicated elsewhere, possibly in different dimensions, but it occupies a unique position among the works gathered at Lelong. On the white surface of the wall, Shepherd deploys a series of matte green rectangles that form a gestalt reminiscent of a Richard Serra construction. The eye, manipulated by subtle changes in the shades of the green she uses for her polygons, creates mass and depth—the shadows in Abbott’s statement—and the figures appear organized into a kind of fortress or labyrinth. This is precisely Shepherd’s point: the wall is itself illusion. While it seems to constrain or limit us, Shepherd’s painted rectangles prove that the tricks played on us by sensory perception can turn any surface into a window opening onto a different world.

Shepherd extends her use of matte finish to the floor sculptures and watercolors on view here. May I Bring a Friend (2024), a 35 by 84 by 81–inch plywood structure, looks like one of Abbott’s figures, able to “move freely about.” It is as if Shepherd’s polygons had come to life and jumped off the canvas. Color predominates here, a rich orange complemented by a pale red. Both hues allude to the bright enamel paintings on the wall nearby, but they are different, as if to occupy our space Shepherd’s forms had to sacrifice the glimmer of oil paint.

The watercolors could be construed as preliminary studies, experiments with color and form, but they are in fact independent works in themselves. The austere Three Walls #37 (2022) is like a floating container with neither top nor bottom, a black rectangle that becomes translucent juxtaposed with a sharply angular polygon, both imposed on a gray rectangle. The composition is subtle enough that the viewer must parse out every angle to appreciate the visual tricks Shepherd is playing. The texture of the Arches paper she uses adds an element not found in the paintings or the sculptures, an irregular surface that gives the watercolor a terrain-like texture.

In one of the rectangles in Three Walls Shepherd abruptly moves from black to gray then back to black as a border, as if to show that mass or solidity is merely an illusion. This technique reappears in one of her most striking paintings, Pinwheel Mask, blackish and whitish (2024). Here Shepherd makes full use of the glossy surface of enamel paint to generate even more visual complexity through reflections. If we begin looking at the left side of the composition, we might think we are looking into a mysterious room. At the top, two swirls of white suggest overhead lights, while below and to the right an ambiguously anthropomorphic figure strikes a menacing pose, his arms folded across his chest. But all that drama is eclipsed by a series of white line rectangles that diminish in size as the eye moves from top to bottom. As our eyes move to the right, the black “room” abruptly ends, and, on the far right, a white field takes control until it too is curtailed on the right edge by a black border.

Shepherd is teasing us with narrative possibilities where no narrative exists. She knows the human eye will organize whatever it perceives into something recognizable. Just as she makes us see mass and depth where neither exists, she tricks us into creating a fiction where no fiction is necessary. Welcome to Flatland!