Katie Hector’s portraits of friends, acquaintances, and strangers become allegories of longing, intimacy, and grief as responses to isolation and dissociation. Layering bleach and dye on canvas, Hector builds up and erases sections of her canvases to create composite likenesses. Within each painting, Hector tests the limits of her canvas fibers to retain or release pigment. As such, the surfaces preserve memories of her process and help produce the final afterimage, which reads as an impression of personhood—an uncanny portrait.

Katie Hector was born in 1992 in Lawrenceville, NJ, and lives in Los Angeles, CA. She earned a BFA in Painting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ (2014).

She has mounted solo exhibitions at Moosey in London, UK (2023); The Cabin in Los Angeles, CA (2022); This Friday or Next Friday in Brooklyn, NY (2018); and Trick Endings in New York City, NY (2015).

She has also participated in group shows such as Fifty Reds in Their Minds at Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, TN (2023); Reminisce at Hollis Taggart in New York City, NY (2023); Twentysomethings at the Orlando Museums of Art in Orlando, FL (2023); California Dreamin’ at Lorin Gallery in Los Angeles, CA (2023); and The Trial at Good Naked in Los Angeles, CA (2023), among others.

Hector has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Lillian Disney Scholarship (2020), the Arquetopia International Residency (2019), the Picture Berlin International Residency (2017), the Merit-Based Scholarship at Urban Glass (2016), the Scott Cagenello Memorial Prize (2014), and the Ruth Crockett Award (2013).