Beth Katleman

In the late 1990s, Beth Katleman exhibited an elaborately adorned porcelain toilet on the floor next to a work by Andy Warhol. More recently, Katleman’s ornate ceramic sculptures have made their way to the walls in compositions that resemble three-dimensional toile. In all of Katleman’s work, she fuses florid Rococo aesthetics with mischievous, sardonic details that question traditional modes of decorative and narrative art. Taking a close look at Girls at War (2013), for instance, reveals closer associations to Henry Darger’s dystopian paintings of armies of young girls brandishing guns than it does bucolic, Baroque picnic scenes.