Preview_CATHERINE CLAYTON-SMITH _ Breeding Beauty

Catherine Clayton-Smith | Breeding Beauty

OLSEN GALLERY

4 - 28 February 2026

Breeding Beauty is a title that speaks to the expansive methodology of making that underpins this body of work. “Breeding” refers to the way images proliferate through my working methods, with each painting carrying traces of many sources. Beauty here is not singular or idealised, but cultivated slowly through a series of adjustments, remaining unstable and perpetually in the process of becoming.

The paintings are built from fragments drawn from a vast archive of photographic sources, both historical and contemporary. No aspect of life is excluded from entering the work. Peripheral details, the overlooked edges of events, spaces, and experiences are treated with as much importance as the primary events themselves. Sources range from autobiographical locations and moments to the broader processes of the art world, including studio and gallery architecture, as well as references to other artworks. Elements of differing significance, time, and scale are embedded together within a single image.

These fragments are gathered and combined in a poetic manner, producing images that oscillate between representation and abstraction. Rather than resolving into fixed depictions, the works resist closure, inviting association and slippage. Meaning remains open, expanding through the viewer’s encounter with the surface.

Process plays a central role in how the paintings take shape. Some paintings are densely worked and adjusted over long periods of time, while others are pared back to the lightest, most transparent mark making. Far more paint is removed than allowed to remain. Surfaces are wiped back, thinned out, and reworked, leaving ghostly traces that register these revisions. Each brush mark seeks to convey more than the fragment it depicts.

What persists is not resolution, but openness and possibility. The paintings remain in a state of becoming, where meaning continues to unfold through the act of looking.