A Quiet Weather of the Mind
For more than four decades, Katherine Bowling has painted landscapes that seem to hold their breath. Her new exhibition, Forecast, on view at Winston Wächter Fine Art in Chelsea from November 5 through December 23, 2026, carries that patient, luminous practice into a body of work where fields, trees and solitary houses feel both remembered and slightly out of reach. It is her second solo show with the gallery, opening with a reception attended by the artist on Thursday, November 5, from 6 to 8 p.m.
The title is apt. A forecast is a reading of conditions not yet arrived, an attempt to sense what the air is about to do. Bowling’s paintings share that suspension: they describe places that look settled and specific, yet register more like atmospheres than addresses.
An Inheritance From the Hudson
Bowling’s lineage is clear. Her paintings descend from the Hudson River School, the 19th-century movement in which painters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church turned the wilderness of New York State into a subject of spiritual meaning. Where those painters favored the sublime (storms, cliffs, vast valleys), Bowling works in a quieter register. Her Romanticism lives in the details: a fence line, the bend of a road, a band of light along the horizon.
The connection is not only art-historical. Bowling lives in the Hudson Valley, and many works in Forecast take their cue from that terrain. Others draw on memories of her childhood in Virginia. The result moves between the observed landscape and an interior one. The fields and trees are recognizable, but filtered and softened, as if seen through the haze of years.
Houses at the Edge of Sight
Houses are the recurring presence in this series, and they rarely announce themselves. Some are painted; others are collaged into the surface, a material shift that quietly unsettles their reality. They sit half-hidden behind trees or float in open fields, inhabited yet strangely remote, like buildings glimpsed in a dream.
Neighbors (2026), the painting that anchors the exhibition, shows this at its most concentrated. Two houses peer through a screen of branches, so absorbed into the woods that they almost disappear. Green dominates the canvas. It encloses the viewer, but it also glows, and light filters through the foliage, drawing the eye deeper into the picture. The title invites a small story (who lives there, how close are they really?) while the painting withholds the answer. Bowling opens a space we can sense but never quite enter.
That tension between shelter and distance gives the work its emotional charge. A house is the most ordinary symbol of belonging. Here it becomes a question about memory: how much of a place we keep, and how much slips back into the trees.
Small Abstractions, Inner Landscapes
Alongside the larger landscapes, Forecast includes a group of small abstract paintings that turn the series decisively inward. Circles, grids, repeated marks and dense fields of color replace trees and rooftops. The forms seem to hover, to open, to hold something in, or to radiate outward.
It would be easy to read these as a departure. Seen in the same room as the landscapes, they feel instead like distillations. The emotional architecture of the larger works (the enclosure of a wood, the pull of a lit horizon, the solitude of a single house) survives here in pure color and shape. They are landscapes with the scenery removed, compact maps of what the bigger canvases locate in fields and light.
The pairing is the show’s most rewarding idea. Moving between the two scales, viewers begin to notice how much of the landscapes was abstract all along, and how much of the abstractions still remembers the land.
A Long Career, Seen Fresh
Born in Washington, D.C., Bowling earned her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1978 and has exhibited in New York and across the United States since the early 1980s. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1991. Her work is held in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Fisher Landau Center.
Forecast shows an artist still refining a vocabulary she has spent a career building. The paintings begin by looking outward, at the Hudson Valley and the Virginia of memory, and end somewhere closer to home: in the interior weather where recollection, sensation and imagination meet.
Katherine Bowling: Forecast — November 5 to December 23, 2026. Winston Wächter Fine Art, 530 West 25th Street, New York. Opening reception with the artist Thursday, November 5, 6–8 p.m. winstonwachter.com · 212-255-2718.
