13FOREST Gallery is pleased to present Closer, an exhibition of new paintings by Catherine Graffam.

In the years since she first began making art as a teenager, Catherine Graffam has developed a keen ability to render emotional depth and personal insight through layers of paint. For most of her career her primary subject has been herself. Self-portraiture was an avenue for visualizing the trauma she experienced as a queer kid in rural Maine, and a way to explore and assert her identity as a trans person. However, after making this type of work for many years, Graffam felt that her practice of intense introspection had become an exercise in picking at old wounds rather than a process of personal healing.

With Closer, Graffam presents her first body of work focused primarily on portraits of other people. Closer marks a turning point for Graffam, a shift away from what used to animate her paintings. With these new intimate depictions of friends and loved ones, Graffam delves into a painting practice that seeks to nourish the soul. Instead of making work that dwells on the tragedy and pain of being queer, Graffam chose to shift her energies toward paintings that reflect queer beauty, love and hope.

While acknowledging her desire to paint from a more optimistic perspective, Graffam also recognized the art world's conspicuous lack of positive representations of queer and trans people, made by queer and trans people. As someone who has rarely seen depictions of people like herself in love, Graffam decided to fill that void and create the art that she wished she had seen as a young person.

As Graffam continued to develop her portrait series, its meaning took on new significance when the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly reshaped everyone's lives. Graffam's work in Closer mirrors the now ubiquitous struggle to find ways to connect with others while public health guidelines require that we keep our distance. Her perceptive portraits offer insight into her subjects' inner lives and engender feelings of intimacy that many people are missing from their lives right now. By inviting the viewer into an aspect of queer and trans lives that is not often depicted, Closer makes a moving statement about the beauty and resilience of queer love.

October 3 - November 13, 2020

Due to public health concerns, we have shifted our focus to digital programming. Check back here to see upcoming special content for Closer.

Close-up - artist talk with Catherine Graffam

Closer Tour - a walk-through of Closer with Catherine Graffam

Preview Closer

Closer Tour

Close-up - Artist Talk with Catherine Graffam

About the Artist

Catherine Graffam is a painter and educator living in Portland, Maine. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2015. Her work has been featured in Big Red & Shiny and New Hampshire Magazine, and has been shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida and several galleries in the Boston area. Her work can also be found in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, University of New Hampshire Art Museum, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the University of North Florida. In 2018, Graffam was profiled in A Big Important Art Book (Now with Women!) by Danielle Krysa, founder of the Jealous Curator. Most recently she was interviewed in a TIME Magazine article and featured in Teen Vogue.

Graffam's work is almost entirely figurative, with a continuing motif of portraiture. Portraits help her better understand the people in her life, including herself. By painting or drawing she is able to build upon and express relationships through emotive brushwork.