About the Artist

Kathryn Bilharz Gabriel is a contemporary artist whose practice moves fluidly between drawing and painting. Her layered approach submerges painted surfaces beneath drawn marks, creating a tactile “skin” that reveals and conceals ambiguous forms. Working with charcoal, watercolor, ink, and fiber paste, she builds surfaces that suggest both material depth and conceptual tension. She is most recognized as having an exquisite range of mark-making in layered, complex imagery.

Gabriel’s work navigates the intersections of organic and mechanical systems, the visible and invisible, and the cultural tensions around identity and aesthetics. Her imagery often recalls anatomical structures, mechanical frameworks, and branching networks, forming a dialogue between the natural world and engineered design. This interplay reflects her personal history: rooted in scientific and mechanical influences, yet informed by her lived experience as a woman in spaces where technology and structure are often coded as masculine. Her practice also raises questions about perception and value. Viewers may seek structural clarity in her compositions while overlooking the feminine and aesthetic nuance that she intentionally embeds. Gabriel embraces this conflict, exploring how beauty, form, and identity can resist reductive readings.

Her work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions, and is held in collections including of Dr. Lewis Dubroff and Jennifer Hunold/Jake Winiski. She has received residency fellowships including EMAR, awards, and grants for her contributions to contemporary drawing and mixed media practices, including in her efforts to further the professional field of art education in New York State.

Gabriel earned her MFA from the University at Albany and BFA from the College of Art and Design at Saint Rose, and has lectured and presented work in both regional and national contexts. She continues to expand her practice through projects that bridge science, technology, and feminist inquiry.

She lives and works in Central New York where she maintains an active studio practice and exhibits regularly.

Influences within Gabriel’s Artistic Practice

Drawing from a personal history rooted in mechanical and scientific realms, Gabriel’s work is infused with her experiences as a woman engaging with identities often coded as masculine, and her interests in scientific phenomena. Gabriel’s compositions explore how structure, systems, and beauty are negotiated in cultural reception: observers may seek formal order in her work while overlooking the feminine or aesthetic nuance she weaves in.

Identity does play a pivotal role in her art practice, as a way of mapping a family tree of influences: Gabriel comes from a personal history between draftsmen in historical design; notable inventors, engineers and scientists who, for several hundred years of her family history, used their skills in drawing for patents, scientific discoveries, drafting mining machinery and nuclear power for the US Government- and recording natural observations of ecology. She also was influenced by her aunt who began UN Women, marching for women’s rights and learning about the power dynamics of global feminist movements. Observations and personal conflicts in gender equality are polarized in Gabriel’s artwork. During her early career as an emerging painter, the development of motherhood of daughters rerouted her practice to investigate the perceptions of female fragility vs power, shifting her practice but not diverging from her signature markmaking. She began building small and large scaffold tools out of nails and wood inspired by the word diadem, a wreath historically worn by powerful men, later softened to symbolize a decorative feature welcoming in the home. Gabriel created a series at this time titled “Diafem,” combining natural objects adhered to the scaffold tools, including an 8’x8’ scaffold using panel and dowels that she physically wrapped her children into, referenced in a series of large-scale, post-dimensional hybrid spaces: neither strictly drawing nor strictly painting. The layering creates a visual tension between surface and depth. This investigation of layered space, identity, and form continues to define Gabriel’s practice today, bridging the mechanical, the natural, and the deeply personal.

Intertwined in these themes is Gabriel’s fascination with the physics of the universe. As a child she was the youngest NASA award recipient for an art contest that sent her, at the age of 10, to Washington, DC for a week of astronaut lectures, meet-and-greets, art exhibits, tours of the Smithsonian, then capped off with a free trip to Florida's Space Camp. This experience impacted Gabriel deeply, and the stars never really left her creative language. Presently, she participates in grant writing and reception of funding through NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Art Education Association to work with Dr. Eric Coughlin, a published astrophysicist and Syracuse University professor to combine theory and research behind black hole and gravity phenomena with artistic visualisations- personally in Gabriel’s artwork, and in the instruction with advanced fine art students in her school district, where she chairs the art department. Gabriel and Coughlin are currently developing a series of children’s books around deep space phenomena. Science and art have always intertwined through the development of Gabriel’s most sought-after artwork.

Forms emerge, dissolve, and invite the viewer into motion… engage closely with each piece or experience several together as a dynamic whole.

In 2025, Gabriel released new artwork both on substrates of vellum and Rives BFK using pumice gel grounds and fiber mediums, which laid the foundation for her to layer, additively and subtractively, figure-ground spaces that relay movement, fluidity, and play of imagery. She first made several surfaces inspired by landscape, repetition, and historical patent drawings of iron ore mining equipment to experiment with “hard and soft” dualities. This led to a group of artwork that simplified similar imagery into almost “characters” from the designed worlds: Mainly non-objective, the viewer sometimes finds familiar imagery, but more often will find comfort in the lulls and waves of motion that develop upon sustained observation. This series is meant to be enjoyed singularly or in groups, defining hybrid spaces with intentionally limited palettes, in mind for interior spaces of any lighting conditions, as they balance high-contrast composition with subtle shifts in detail.