Part 4 of 4: The Space Where Things Are Still Becoming
In Part 1, we began with Abbott, grounding ourselves in observation and the act of looking. In Part 2, through Christine Lorenz, that structure began to loosen, revealing a space that felt less fixed. In Part 3, we stepped back to consider Cézanne and the philosophical shift toward perception as something unstable and continuous. Now, in Part 4, we arrive at the work of Kristen Letts Kovak, where that instability is no longer a question, but a condition to work within.
Kristen Letts Kovak is a Pittsburgh-based artist, professor, and curator whose work explores the shifting boundary between representation and abstraction. Trained in painting and drawing at Mercyhurst University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, she currently serves as Senior Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries across the country, investigating the complex relationship between perception, pattern, and the instability of what we see.
There is a moment, standing in front of one of Kristen Letts Kovak’s paintings, where the instinct to define what you are seeing begins to fall away.
At first, it is subtle.
A shape suggests something familiar. A space begins to feel like it might resolve into something known. The mind reaches, as it always does, to organize, to name, to understand.
And then it doesn’t quite hold.
The form shifts. The color moves. What felt like a surface opens into something less certain. Not chaotic but not fixed either.
A quiet recalibration begins to take place.
In speaking with Kristen (Interview), it becomes clear that this is not an effect she is constructing so much as a condition she is working within.
“I don’t imagine what they’re going to look like before I make them,” she says.
The paintings do not begin as images waiting to be realized. They begin as something closer to a catalyst. A mark, a color, a fragment of material. From there, they evolve. They shift. They are adjusted, revisited, and sometimes dismantled and reformed again.
“I think of them as an evolution as opposed to a final product.”
There is no fixed endpoint guiding the work forward. Instead, there is an ongoing conversation between the painting and the person making it. Something emerges, and in response, something else is altered.
Often, she works on multiple paintings at once, moving between them. A color discovered in one finds its way into another. A form echoes, then diverges. Over time, the paintings begin to carry traces of one another, as if they exist not as isolated objects, but as parts of a larger, shifting field.
Nothing is entirely separate.
That idea, which appears so clearly in the finished work, is not theoretical for Kristen. It is lived.
She speaks about her body as something that is constantly shifting, joints moving unpredictably, structure never fully fixed. Over time, that experience has reshaped how she understands stability itself.
“I think I’m at peace with things that are chaotic and uncertain.”
What might feel disorienting to someone else becomes, for her, a place of familiarity. Even calm.
That sense of acceptance carries into the paintings. What could be read as instability instead becomes a kind of openness. A willingness to let things move, to allow for change, to follow what emerges rather than forcing resolution.
There are moments in the studio, she describes, where she deliberately quiets the part of her mind that wants to analyze and direct. She listens to audiobooks, not to follow the narrative, but to occupy language itself, allowing another mode of attention to take over.
“I’ve learned to listen to the secondary voice,” she says. “It’s quieter.”
It is that quieter voice that guides the work.
Not toward an answer, but toward a state of responsiveness.
The paintings that result do not ask to be solved. They ask to be experienced. To be entered, briefly, without the need to fix them in place.
There is something generous in that.
In a world that so often asks us to define, categorize, and resolve, these works offer another possibility. One where meaning is not singular, where perception is not stable, and where each viewer brings their own internal landscape into the encounter.
“I think what I would want,” she says, “is maybe an awareness of the magic of everyone’s different internal state.”
It is a quiet statement, but it holds something expansive.
Not a rejection of reality, but an acknowledgment of its complexity. Not a loss of structure, but a rethinking of what structure might be.
In Part 3, we considered the moment when painting began to question what it saw.
Here, that question is no longer something to resolve.
It is something to live within.
And in that space, where nothing is entirely fixed and everything remains in the process of becoming, something else begins to emerge.
Not certainty.
But possibility.
To watch interview with Kristen follow this link
Gallery Note
An opening reception hosted by Mark Rengers Gallery for two exhibitions, Ambiguous Boundaries and A Showcase of Sweetwater’s 2026 Master Class Artists will be held on Friday, April 3 from 6 to 8 pm in the First National Bank Exhibition Hall.
First National Bank (find the side door entrance to the second floor) 604 Beaver Street, Sewickley, PA 15143
The Exhibitions will be on view from April 3 through May 30, 2026 at the First National Bank Exhibition Hall, hosted by Mark Rengers Gallery in collaboration with Sweetwater Center for the Arts and graciously sponsored by First National Bank. A portion of sales from the exhibition will support the Youth Arts Possibilities Program (YAPP), an initiative run by Sweetwater Center for the Arts and sponsored by First National Bank. Together, these efforts are intended to create a broader space for artists and audiences to engage with the evolving experience of contemporary painting.
Resources
The operative word is "openness"!
I am drawn to the outlining for some reason…I love the play of colors and how the outlines provide fluid boundaries.