Caroline Kent

Caroline Kent (born 1975) is an American visual artist based in Chicago, best known for her large scale abstract painting works that explore the interplay between language and translation.

Inspired by her own personal experiences and her cultural heritage, Kent creates paintings that explore the power and limitations of communication.

Her work, influenced by her Mexican heritage, delves into the potentials and confines of language and reconsiders the modernist canon of abstraction.

She likens her composition process to choreography, revealing an interconnectedness between language, abstraction, and painting.

Kent's artwork showcases an evolving dialogue of space, matter, and time, resulting in a confluence of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and performance, blurring the lines between these mediums.

Caroline Kent was born in Sterling, Illinois, United States.

There she grew up with her mother, father, older sister Angela, and twin sister Christine.

Her mother, a Mexican homemaker, and her father, an African American accountant, highly influenced Kent's work ethic.

A self-described Midwesterner, Kent spent her summers growing up working summer jobs detasseling corn and dreaming of a greater life outside the borders of her small town.

Caroline Kent was very close to her twin sister, Christine Leventhal, growing up.

The two shared a unique method of communication which has been highly influential in Kent's artwork.

In 1993, Kent left her hometown of Sterling to attend Illinois State University on an athletic scholarship for track and field.

Here, her early inspirations included the art of Russian Constructivists and foreign films.

Kent became mesmerized by the universality of the visual language found in art, discovering that on a canvas everyone had the same starting point, without having to pass through linguistic barriers.

Caroline Kent pursued her early education at Illinois State University, securing a B.A. in 1998.

After her graduation in 1998, Kent joined the Peace Corps, where she lived and worked in Transylvania, Romania for two years.

Here, Kent found herself inspired by the multitude of pastel colors that would later play an important part in some of her most well known works.

After the Peace Corps, Kent resided in Minneapolis for 15 years.

Kent later received her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota in 2008.

Kent has also worked as an assistant professor of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University.

Kent is represented by Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Patron Gallery in Chicago.

Kent's artistic endeavors are rooted in an interrogation of abstract painting, focusing on the intricacies of language and translation.

Her work is influenced heavily by her rich Mexican heritage and her personal experiences with language and textual translation, deriving from personal experiences with her twin sister.

These cultural references and personal experiences combine in Kent's work to depict a new form of communication, exploring both the powers and limitations of language.

Her abstract paintings communicate how visual language can be understood in expanded forms, through both two dimensional abstract paintings and three dimensional timed based performances.

Kent draws influence for her artwork from her Mexican heritage.

The "bold spontaneity" and rich "structuralist dynamics" of Mexican artists such has Pedro Coronel and Luis Barragán have played a role in the large scale works full of color and texture created by Kent.

Her visit to Casa Luis Barragan in Mexico City was very impactful on her series Victoria/Vernica: The figment between us. Through exploring her Mexican heritage in her art, Kent has been able to participate in a discourse of abstraction that has historically marginalized artists of color.

The interaction with nature that is emphasized by Mexican artists has also played a role in influencing the pastel colors and organic shapes that appear in Kent's abstract works.

Her artworks often reflect an amalgamation of geometry, color, and pattern, reminiscent of the profound geometries of Hilma Af Klint and atmospheric abstractions by Alma Thomas.

Furthermore, her work encapsulates the choreography of linguistic concepts.

A feature of her artistry is the consistent use of a black background as a canvas, symbolizing a void or 'unlocatable' space, offering a neutral ground for language to reside in.

Kent's paintings have developed to reflect her pursuit of understanding the language of painting in expanded forms.

They transition from two-dimensional constructs to three-dimensional, and eventually, time-based performances.

Kent's paintings often operate like sketches, with a process fueled by improvisation and experimentation.

Kent reports that she visualizes her paintings as formulas or cosmic equations, inviting reinterpretations and new ways of comprehension.

Kent's most well known series is entitled Victoria/Veronica: The figment between us.

This series draws on Kent's personal experience as a twin as the fictional framework for the imaginary twins in the exhibition.

Named for her mothers first two names, the series references communication and "telepathic correspondence" between a set of fictional twins.

The exhibit explores how unspoken language can operate between sisters.