Kate Groobey (B. 1979)

Gate Pose is a yoga position. The upraised arm and leftward lean of the figure in Kate Groobey’s vibrant painting captures something of this stance, but the body is strangely distorted, arm morphing into leg, and the torso a confusing mass of shapes. Groobey contorts her figures to impossible form through a physical process of revision, somewhat akin to Georg Baselitz’s ‘remix’ paintings of the 1980s. ‘I’ll start line drawings in a sketchbook, then I’ll add watercolour, and then I’ll chop them up and collage them,’ she explains. ‘I also photocopy some of them and chop the photocopies up, muddle them around. Then I’ll draw back from the collages, so they all get churned up.’ The gridded green background of the finished work refers back to the artist’s cutting board. Often pictured dancing or exercising, these figures embody a fascination with the movement of the human form, a sense of physical fluidity echoing the contortions Groobey herself must go through: with the canvas laid on the floor, ‘it’s quite a physical job to lean over and actually make the things.’ Even as the figure is stretched to near-abstraction, Groobey’s painting celebrates the body and the brush in all their freedom.