About

Kate Sharkey’s work feels like wandering through a city you’ve never been to but somehow know in your bones. Her paintings and drawings are a push and pull of energy—maps to nowhere, blueprints of being. They are dense, intricate, and alive, full of jagged lines that feel like fractured architecture, layered with colors that seem to breathe. These works demand you look closer, get lost, and find your way back again.

Sharkey tackles the big stuff: identity, politics, the weight and wonder of being a woman. There’s a tension in her process—a wrestling match between control and chaos that spills out into the work. Her art holds the ephemeral and the eternal in a precarious balance, asking you to sit with the uncomfortable beauty of it all.

A New York City-based artist, Sharkey honed her craft under legends like Ronnie Landfield and Larry Poons, and her BFA from Brooklyn College grounds her work in both discipline and rebellion. She’s exhibited everywhere from Paris to the gritty corners of LIC, collecting awards and residencies along the way. Yet, her work doesn’t shout; it hums, resonates, lingers—like the last note of a song you didn’t want to end.

Sharkey’s art doesn’t give you easy answers. It’s not supposed to. Instead, it invites you into its layered narratives to get messy, to think, to feel. It’s art that makes space for you—where your own questions and contradictions can come alive.