Caroline Kent

We are often attracted to artists experimenting with the limits of representation and legibility; artists who play with the formal systems that allow us to make sense (and nonsense) of the world. Caroline Kent (b. 1975) is one such artist, whose recent experiments in printmaking have sparked our interest.

Kent's printmaking practice begins in experimentation, cutting out improvisational shapes before layering them across the ground. Each shape is like a word, coming into careful and playful conversation with its peers, and each work like a sentence, filling out the growing dictionary of a secret language.

Caroline Kent in the studio at Paulson Fontaine Press, 2022. For more images, click here.

As she describes it, intaglio printing lets the layers of shapes that define the lexicon of her paintings “announce” themselves in a process of addition, subtraction, pressure and release. 

Kent’s work—for its interest in the limits of language, the cosmos, and its experimentation with a black pictorial ground—is often placed in the history of abstraction alongside artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Hilma af Klimt, and Ellsworth Kelly. In her paintings, this darkness is achieved through swaths of black gesso. With printmaking, she achieves a similar effect through aquatint.

Caroline Kent
A poem about the cosmos, 2022
Color aquatint, sugarlift and spitbite aquatints with softground etching
50 1/2 x 36 in.

These prints build on recent forms developed for exhibitions at the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Kent lives and works in Chicago, and is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.

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