Katinka Huang: Stage Fright — Katinka Huang

McBride / Dillman is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Katinka Huang, opening November 6, 2026. Born in Shanghai, raised between China and the United Kingdom, and now based in New York, Huang makes psychologically charged paintings in which the female body becomes unstable—multiplied, distorted, watched, and continually remade.

Huang’s women move between solitude and multiplicity. In some paintings, a figure appears alone; elsewhere, figures double and multiply, bodies stretch beyond ordinary proportion or collapse into smaller versions of themselves. A face reappears on a television screen. One woman looks toward another who may be an alter ego, reflection, memory, or projection. Even when a figure is solitary, the stability of the self remains uncertain. Huang treats identity less as something fixed than as a shifting cast of characters, moving between protagonist and antagonist, observer and observed. The resulting scenes possess the logic of dreams or a private cinema. Huang conjures uncanny, theatrical worlds in which the self is obsessively reinvented and re-examined.

Many of these paintings begin with photographs Huang takes of herself in ordinary moments. Turning the camera toward her own body, she describes the process as a form of self-portraiture undertaken from outside herself—”like a fly on the wall staring back at myself.” An unfamiliar posture, a strange camera angle, or an incidental gesture can make her own body suddenly appear foreign. Painting allows Huang to explore this estrangement further, transforming the source image until the body becomes a stranger and autobiography gives way to something closer to fiction.

Huang’s women lounge, pose, crawl, watch, and perform. Their bodies can be seductive and grotesque, vulnerable and comic, sometimes within the same painting. Braided hair and recurring faces provide points of recognition, but repetition never produces a stable identity. Instead, the self splinters into competing versions.

This doubling evokes the duality of identity. For Huang, the gesture is inseparable from an adolescence spent between China and an all-girls school in the United Kingdom, where she grew up negotiating different cultural expectations surrounding female appearance and behavior. She has described this continual adjustment as a form of contortion, a condition she now translates into bodies that refuse to remain fixed. There is no single woman to uncover beneath the competing roles, but a self continually multiplying in response to how she sees herself and how she imagines herself being seen.

The paintings externalize an internal dialogue, their characters exchanging cryptic gazes. Each figure carries a separate impulse, a different version of the self given its own body. Identity here is never resolved, only repeatedly negotiated. Huang’s process mirrors this instability. She builds her paintings through repeated layering and erasure, allowing earlier bodies and gestures to remain as traces beneath subsequent ones. Forms emerge through revision as much as through addition. Thin passages of paint, exposed marks, abrupt shifts in scale, and areas that appear partially erased give the paintings a provisional quality, as though their figures might transform again at any moment.

Huang pushes the female body to its edges—stretching, exaggerating, multiplying, and sometimes undoing it altogether. Her figures refuse the composure historically demanded of representations of women. They are confused, absurd, animalistic, awkward, seductive, and occasionally monstrous. Through them, Huang proposes distortion not simply as something imposed upon the body, but as a possible means of escaping its prescribed definitions. By embracing ambiguity and instability, her practice explores what she describes as “the impossibility of defining the feminine without deforming it.”

Katinka Huang (b. 1998, Shanghai, China) is an artist based in New York. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2023 and her BFA from Paris College of Art in 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include Dreamers vs Swimmers at Galeria Leyendecker, Tenerife (2024), and The Apartment at LatchKey Gallery, New York (2023).Galeria Leyendecker, Tenerife (2024), and The Apartment at LatchKey Gallery, New York (2023).