Kate Zimmerman Turpin: The Light the Ground Gives

Megan Mulrooney Gallery is pleased to present The Light the Ground Gives, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Kate Zimmerman Turpin. The artist’s first solo presentation, the exhibition will be on view from February 24 - March 28.

Based in the Texas Hill Country, Zimmerman Turpin draws from its particular qualities of light, plant life, and wide terrain to produce large-scale paintings in acrylic and pastel on canvas. Rather than directly transcribing a landscape, the paintings are shaped by memory, atmosphere, and emotion. Her resulting works unfold like remembered landscapes rather than observed ones, fields of color and motion where botanical forms surface, blur, and recede.

Pigment sinks, feathers, and disperses into Zimmerman Turpin's surfaces. The paintings avoid sharp edges; instead, color and form engage in a perpetual dance as recurring motifs like daisies, poppies, and unfurling greens function as rhythmic markers across the canvases. A pale blue bloom or a sudden wash of yellow might, at other times, register as weather, friction, or fleeting joy, depending on what the viewer brings to the encounter. Throughout the exhibition, botanical density is consistently counterweighted by open ground, allowing the compositions to breathe while maintaining a sense of accumulation when viewed from afar.

In several works, faint suggestions of architecture or narrative structure begin to surface, like windows, thresholds, or elements of domestic interiors - yet these remain provisional, never fully anchoring the image. The paintings therefore situate the viewer in a space that feels both external and internal. In this way, Zimmerman Turpin’s work draws from traditions of plein-air painting while also engaging a lineage of post-impressionist and early modernist painters who understood the observable world as porous and emotionally saturated.

The Light the Ground Gives presents painting as a site where sensation, memory, and landscape fold into one another. Zimmerman Turpin’s works invite sustained looking, encounters that unfold slowly, attentive to the pressure of feeling held in color.