Presenting
Calibration: Kathryn Kerr, Cameron Martin, Nadir Souirgi
November 15, 2025 – January 31, 2026
Opening reception with Cameron Martin and Nadir Souirgi November 15, 2025 from 5 – 7 pm
Cameron Martin and Nadir Souirgi will present an artist talk at the opening reception at 5 pm.
Abattoir Gallery is thrilled to present Calibration: Kathryn Kerr, Cameron Martin, and Nadir Souirgi. This group show presents work by three New York artists, each intent upon expanding the parameters of contemporary painting through distinct vocabularies, technologies, and methods of production. Exhibiting together for the first time, the artists participate in the evolution of a new category of painted image, one that resists easy linguistic capture. Visually compelling, formally rigorous, and intellectually centered, the work attempts to dismantle outdated binaries such as abstraction/representation, figure/ground and subject/object, and proposes that the expanded field of painting is vibrant and full of potential for critical engagement.
Incorporating a diverse lexicon of painting languages from gestural to hard edge, Kathryn Kerr thinks of her work as unfolding like a conversation. Moving between chance and structure, the paintings arrive through a toggle of layering and erasure, with the composition shifting with each pass over the surface. Kerr begins a painting with a sketch and a loose sense of the palette, and from there starts working on the canvas in acrylic, moving back and forth from intuitive and more deliberate marks. When things cohere, she moves to oil paint, locking her configuration in with saturated color. The forms she conjures come from both memory and invention, sometimes sparked by a turn of phrase, or the sensations it evokes. Fragments of places, gestures and experiences that have stayed with her make their way into the picture plane until “the image feels like a lived space, or a distinct memory rather than a picture of something.”
Cameron Martin’s work trades in what he calls “almost signs”, instances where the signifier and the signified don’t quite latch. Beginning with pictures of graphic elements he encounters in the world, the artist then renders forms not directly appropriated from, but rather informed by his ever-expanding image bank. The resulting components in his paintings work associatively, evoking something that is familiar but not definitively nameable. Where a certain legibility might be suggested at the onset, with protracted viewing improbable shadows and other ghostly marks reveal themselves, invoking representational possibilities that ultimately become destabilized as the initial perception of solidity starts to splinter. The paintings can sometimes be mistaken for digital printing or a photomechanical process, but they are in fact made by hand using sophisticated stenciling techniques and unorthodox paint applications, working towards an image that complicates traditional assumptions about what constitutes a painting.
Nadir Souirgi starts his paintings with what he calls “skins,’ which are generated from either cast off pieces of previous efforts or newly generated imagery made through scraping, dripping or pouring paint on canvas. After deciding on a grouping that forms the composition, the skins are laminated to multiple layers of canvas and then subjected to additional treatments with paint, acrylic medium and wet sanding, slowly building their pictorial surface through an almost geological process of accretion and erosion. Once the painting is built up to a certain level, a last pass is made with a combination of liquid stencil and silkscreen, complicating the borders between the skins, and obscuring our ability to make judgements about how the work came into being. The resulting image, which is then mounted to wooden supports designed by the artist, provokes something of a temporal collapse, blurring any sense of before and after. Marks that might at first read as “glitch” reveal themselves as self-conscious glyphs or palimpsests embedded in the pictorial field, in a manner that scrambles any clear sense of negative or positive, presence or absence.
The dialogue between these three artists is meant to arouse inquiry as much as offer solutions. In many ways, what at first appears to be something of a shared sensibility becomes more complicated and nuanced over time, much like the work itself. If there is a through line to be found between them, it is the belief that painting remains a vital container for knotty histories and expansive invention, a site of continued potentiality, now as much as any time in the past.
Kathryn Kerr received her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from The Cooper Union. Kerr’s work has been exhibited at White Columns, Magenta Plains, James Cope Gallery, Chapter Gallery, Project Native Informant, and Lomex, among others. She is based in New York.
Cameron Martin received his BA from Brown University and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, City Gallery (Wellington, New Zealand), and Tel Aviv Museum. His paintings are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. He is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship.
Nadir Souirgi earned his MFA from Yale University and was awarded the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize. His work has been shown in Miami, New York, Vienna, and Munich. He lives and works between New Haven and New York.