Veronique Wantz Gallery is excited to present local artist Kathy Snow Stratton's first solo exhibition with the gallery, REVEALED, featuring exquisite, highly-detailed abstract paintings and works on paper 

Opening reception: Saturday, Oct. 3rd, 2026 from 4-7 PM

REVEALED runs from Oct 3 - November 7, 2026 and features new work by the artist. 

Through abstract painting, Kathy Snow Stratton interrogates the universal metaphysical dichotomies that shape us. The tensions between empty and full, the finite and the infinite, memory and the present, and light and darkness are the polarities that form the recurring themes of REVEALED. Rather than executing a predetermined vision, each canvas reveals its own meaning during the creative process, while the artist follows her brush to the edge of knowing.

A Minnesota-based artist, the Maine native traces her breakthrough into abstraction to the Maine woods. “Deep in the winter woods near my home, I found myself not looking at the tree branches, but at the spaces between them. That was the moment I began to contemplate negative space rather than the tangible object as my true subject. Painting those spaces, instead of the branches, triggered a shift toward an expression beyond the physical form and beyond Nature itself."

For more than two decades, Kathy Snow Stratton has been recognized for her large-scale abstract acrylic paintings. Each canvas is optically charged with repetitive, rhythmic, gestural brushstrokes. Working in distinct series, she utilizes a framework of self-imposed limitations designed to expand, rather than restrict, her creative process. As Stratton writes, “Each painting reveals a personal assertion of truth and engages me like no other. They transport, test, and surprise me with their specific realm of possibility. For me, it is entirely about being in the painting."

She credits the Maine woods for her breakthrough into abstract painting. The overlapping complexity of branches through dense trees in the afternoon light of winter inspired her creations.

“Layers of vigorous line characterize Kathy Stratton's paintings. Stratton builds densely layered images out of angling, slightly arching strokes. Looking at the paintings, a viewer can feel the artist's hand entering and exiting the surface countless times and imagine that the act of making holds meditative potential for the artist. In some works the strokes dissolve into misty, gray fields, in others they remain deliberate and defined like the overlapping and precise shadows of grasses or the bare tree limbs in the densest of forests conceivable." —Kristin Hileman, Assistant Curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian of International Modern and Contemporary Art, Washington,DC

“Kathy Snow Stratton weaves nearly monochromatic color fields by dripping paint across up-ended canvases, then rendering thread-like lines across its surface.  The end result is quiet canvases that seem simple, but harbor great complexity and visual texture upon close inspection.  They feel like islands of calm sanctuary in the rolling sea of chaos that makes up modern life as we know it."  —Tom Whipple, Northern Virginia Art Beat, Arlington, VA

Stratton has shown her paintings in galleries in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern United States. She now lives in the Minneapolis Area and recently showed in Unexpected Ends, Redepenning Gallery, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hopkins, MN and juried the Oil/Acrylic/Mixed Media Painting Class 1 at the 2024 Minnesota State Fairs 113th Fine Arts Juried Exhibition, Falcon Hills, MN. 

When not painting in her Minnesota lakefront home studio, Stratton can be found floating in her Scott canoe on one of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes with her husband, Fred.