For her first exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Kaye Donachie presents To conjure you up and make you fade. Donachie’s new paintings focus on five staged portraits drawn from historical biography and archival sources. These portraits depict protagonists in the artist’s pictorial world in which she charts a fragmentary narrative. The paintings revisit a place in which poets and performers create a form of theater that often allows strange visions to emerge. In To conjure you up and make you fade Claire Goll, Franziska zu Reventlow and Emmy Hennings are subjects that Donachie has painted before, which simultaneously reveal themselves and disappear through the intensity of color and light across the surfaces of the works. These female protagonists are rendered as pre-modernist heroines and spectral transfigurations of their real personas. Donachie paints them as actors in a dissident ficti on – a mythopoetic imagining of alternative histories. In her paintings there is a constellation of moments and gestures that are subdued and subjective, altogether creating hushed portraits.

Kaye Donachie lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include The Brotherhood of Subterranea, Kunstbunker, Nuremberg; At Home, Yvon Lambert, New York; If Everybody had an Ocean curated by Alex Farquharson, Tate St Ives & CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative, curated by Jens Hoffmann, Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Tate Triennial curated by Beatrix Ruf, Tate Britain, London; Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Walpurgis Night at Peres Projects Berlin in May 2009, and Maureen Paley, London in 2010.