Kim Schoenstadt

Recipient of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting

Salt Lake Art Center and the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation are pleased to announce the inaugural recipient of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting: Kim Schoenstadt.

Ms. Schoenstadt will receive a $15,000 award and a solo exhibition at the Art Center from November 4, 2011, through February 18, 2012.

Ms. Schoenstadt embodies the spirit of the Doctorow Prize through her passionate dedication to a practice in contemporary painting. Her painterly, site-specific projects, which frequently include elements of audience participation, incorporate complex urban views, themes of modernist architecture, and historically informed explorations of image and society.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, art critic Christopher Knight notes that Ms. Schoenstadt’s creations are those of “a view painter. Her work records complex urban landscapes. Unlike her 18th century forebears, however, who lived in a world where visual perception was being elastically stretched by telescopes, microscopes, and other ground-glass lenses meant to aid the limited range of a human eye, the Los Angeles artist surveys very different terrain. Her knotty work charts the intersection between the bricks and mortar of actual city streets and the effervescent elements of virtual reality. That’s where we live now.”

Ms. Schoenstadt has exhibited at: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; as well as locations in New York, Paris, Munich and Istanbul. Her work has been reviewed in ArtForum, the Los Angeles Times, Artweek Magazine, and Art in America.