Catherine Kurtz

Catherine Kurtz is a British painter and writer whose work explores female experience, mortality, beauty and the ways in which women have been represented and constrained within society. Working with a precise, highly observed realism, she often isolates familiar objects or natural specimens against spare backgrounds, allowing their symbolic and psychological associations to come to the fore.

Born in Cambridge and brought up in London, Kurtz completed an art foundation at Wimbledon School of Art before studying Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art, where her tutors included Lucy Jones, Clyde Hopkins, Tony Fry and David Hepher. Her contemporaries included Chris Ofili and Neal Tait, with Gavin Turk in the year above. After graduating she became artist-in-residence at the Royal Ballet School.

Much of Kurtz’s earlier work examined the representation of women through objects closely associated with femininity and appearance. Paintings of shoes, underwear and make-up considered the pressures surrounding female identity, desirability and self-presentation, often combining seriousness with a dry sense of humour.

These concerns subsequently developed into the Torn series, in which fragments of fabric suggest lingerie, clothing or upholstery samples. Kurtz has described each piece as “a choice, a possibility, a persona, an ideal woman, pressure, potential failure”, using the apparently ordinary material as a metaphor for competing expectations placed upon women.

In the related Pinned series, butterflies are shown immobilised and displayed as specimens. For Kurtz, the image carries a more unsettling implication: the butterfly is “pinned down, killed for its beauty”, its vitality arrested and possessed by the collector. The paintings extend her examination of beauty, control and objectification while also introducing broader questions of vulnerability and mortality.

Mortality is explored more directly in the Memento Mori paintings of dead birds found in the countryside around her home in Kent. Kurtz has described the brief interval before decay as “a very tender and mysterious moment”, and the resulting works combine close observation with an acute awareness of fragility and transience. These three related bodies of work were brought together in her fourth Redfern solo exhibition, Pinned, in 2021–22.

Alongside her painting, Kurtz has developed a substantial career as a writer. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from West Dean College and has written on food for publications including The Spectator’s Scoff, ckbk and Celebrated Living. She is a member of the Guild of Food Writers and a Grand Jury member of the International Chocolate Awards.

Her debut novel, Feast, was published by Dialogue Books in June 2026. Set between nineteenth-century London and France, it follows a young woman with an extraordinary sense of taste who becomes a poison-taster in an aristocratic household. Like her painting, the novel explores female experience, identity, vulnerability and the pressures exerted upon women by the societies around them.

Catherine Kurtz is represented by The Redfern Gallery.