Between City and Nature: Solo exhibition May 23 to July 25, 2026
Hunt Club-Riverside Park Community Centre
3320 Paul Anka Drive, Ottawa
Drawing from the spaces between urban structure and the organic world, this exhibition explores the emotional and sensory residue of place. Through layered abstraction, texture, gesture, and colour, Catherine Gutsche reflects on how memory is shaped by both constructed environments and natural landscapes. Inspired equally by weathered city surfaces, wandering streets, shoreline rhythms, and fleeting moments in nature, the paintings become records of observation, intuition, and transformation.
Rather than depicting recognizable scenes, these works distill experience into fragments of movement, atmosphere, and feeling. Scraped layers, veiled marks, and shifting compositions reveal traces of earlier decisions, allowing the history of each painting to remain visible beneath the surface. This process mirrors the way cities and landscapes evolve over time; built upon, eroded, repaired, and reclaimed.
The tension between order and spontaneity plays a central role throughout the exhibition. Geometric structures and linear interruptions suggest architecture, pathways, and human intervention, while fluid gestures and textured passages evoke erosion, growth, water, wind, and natural decay. In this interplay, boundaries between the urban and the natural begin to dissolve.
Between City and Nature invites viewers to move intuitively through the work, discovering connections between external environments and internal experience. These paintings are not fixed narratives, but open spaces for reflection -places where memory, sensation, and imagination come together. Through abstraction, the exhibition asks us to consider how deeply the environments we inhabit shape our emotional landscapes, and how beauty can emerge from both the ordered and the unpredictable.
Hunt Club-Riverside Park Community Centre
3320 Paul Anka Drive, Ottawa
Drawing from the spaces between urban structure and the organic world, this exhibition explores the emotional and sensory residue of place. Through layered abstraction, texture, gesture, and colour, Catherine Gutsche reflects on how memory is shaped by both constructed environments and natural landscapes. Inspired equally by weathered city surfaces, wandering streets, shoreline rhythms, and fleeting moments in nature, the paintings become records of observation, intuition, and transformation.
Rather than depicting recognizable scenes, these works distill experience into fragments of movement, atmosphere, and feeling. Scraped layers, veiled marks, and shifting compositions reveal traces of earlier decisions, allowing the history of each painting to remain visible beneath the surface. This process mirrors the way cities and landscapes evolve over time; built upon, eroded, repaired, and reclaimed.
The tension between order and spontaneity plays a central role throughout the exhibition. Geometric structures and linear interruptions suggest architecture, pathways, and human intervention, while fluid gestures and textured passages evoke erosion, growth, water, wind, and natural decay. In this interplay, boundaries between the urban and the natural begin to dissolve.
Between City and Nature invites viewers to move intuitively through the work, discovering connections between external environments and internal experience. These paintings are not fixed narratives, but open spaces for reflection -places where memory, sensation, and imagination come together. Through abstraction, the exhibition asks us to consider how deeply the environments we inhabit shape our emotional landscapes, and how beauty can emerge from both the ordered and the unpredictable.
