Kathleen Gilje is an American art restorer and artist. She is best known for her appropriations of Old Master Paintings which combine their historical provenance with contemporary ideas and perspective.
In 1973, she returned to New York and worked in the conservation studio of Marco Grassi, where she restored Old Master paintings for private and museum clients, including Stanley Moss, E.V. Thaw, Robert Dance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Norton Simon Collection in Pasadena, and the Thyssen Bornemizsa Collection. In 1976, she opened her own studio. During this period, she also created artistic works, initially relief sculpture and then painting which was exhibited in various SoHo galleries. Gilje began to combine her knowledge of conservation with her own paintings in the early 1990s.
Alternative readings
In her paintings, drawings and installations, Gilje applies an art historical analysis and uses methodologies of conservation to create altered versions of familiar paintings which suggest alternative interpretations of the original artworks. In this way, she encourages her audience to think about a work of art on several levels: its material and historical narrative. An example of this is Rembrandt's Danaë defaced by a vandal with acid in the Hermitage, its contemporary symbolism translated into up-to-date equivalents; another is Caravaggio's Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Restored, 1992, where the lizard is replaced by a syringe, suggesting a link to the risk of AIDS. Many of her paintings engage with feminist issues, although they are sometimes controversial. In Susanna and the Elders, Restored, 1998, Gilje exhibits a recreation of Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders'' hanging next to an x-ray of the painting. When Gilje recreated Gentileschi's painting, she made an underpainting in lead white of Gentileschi's own rape by Agostino Tassi. In the x-ray we see Gentileschi's arm extended holding a knife in self-defense and her face contorted and screaming. The image can faintly be seen in the pentimento as well. Her references are provocative as she addresses timely social, political and personal concerns.
Portraits
Gilje created a number of portraits in which her subjects were placed in the context of an historic painting of their choice; these were displayed in her exhibition Curators and Connoisseur at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, in 2006. For example, art historian Linda Nochlin chose Édouard Manet's 1882 Bar at the Folies Bergère for Gilje's Linda Nochlin at the Bar at the Folies Bergere, 2006, and art historian Robert Rosenblum chose Ingres’ 1823/26 Comte de Pastoret for his Gilje portrait of 2005.
