Catharine Clark Gallery is thrilled to announce our return to The Armory Show with a special Solo section presentation, featuring new metalpoints and melted lead crystal sculptures and sconces by Katherine Vetne. Visit us at Booth 225 to experience this extraordinary new body of work, which marks the artist's highly anticipated New York solo debut.
A cornerstone of New York’s cultural landscape since 1994, The Armory Show opens the fall art season by bringing the world’s leading international contemporary and modern art galleries to the Javits Center each year. The fair emphasizes thoughtful programming, elevated presentations, curatorial excellence, meaningful institutional partnerships, and engaging public art activations.
For the Armory Show 2026, Catharine Clark Gallery presents "Between Worlds," a solo booth by emerging artist Katherine Vetne. Through a dialogue of hyperdetailed metalpoint drawings and distorted crystal sculptures, Vetne approaches the still life genre through a lens of unreality and dissociation, transforming domestic objects into uncanny specimens.
Vetne’s drawings utilize metalpoint, a Renaissance technique using gold and silver wire on prepared chalk panels. She renders markers of “well-mannered wealth”—porcelain tchotchkes by brands like Fenton and Lenox—with eerie detachment.
Employing raking light and disheveled arrangements, she situates these objects in a purgatory-like realm. Vetne notes that these compositions channel “psychological dissociation,” where domestic decorations feel “trapped in the amber of their own unsettling environments,” suspended between past aspirations and an uncertain future. Complementing these rigid renderings are Vetne’s melted lead crystal sculptures. Sourced from resale sites, vintage crystal dinnerware is kiln-fired into amorphous, surrealist forms.
Together, these works create a friction between signifiers of taste and the legacies of social division required to maintain them. "Between Worlds" offers a critical look at how we seek security through objects, underscoring a transitional moment where corporate power and personal identity become uncomfortably entwined. Vetne's work has been collected by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and exhibited at the museum and at Crystal Bridges.
In Fall 2026, the gallery will announce a major institutional acquisition of a significant metalpoint by Vetne by a San Francisco-based museum.
