Cathy Josefowitz was born in 1956 in New York. At the age of 16 she
entered the Théâtre National de Strasbourg to study
theatre
design. She settled there with Romain Denis, grandson of the painter
Maurice Denis and an artist in his own right. She abandoned her studies
before the end of the first year and moved to Paris, where she entered the
École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She helped Romain Denis on the sets of
Molière
by Ariane Mnouchkine but preferred to spend time alone and paint. Her
first works were large
expressionist
and
figurative paintings
on kraft paper. In the
United
States she discovered
dance
and primal theatre, a technique focused on improvisation and the search
for raw, primitive and unconscious emotions. In 1979, at the age of
23, she went to England to study dance at the Dartington College of Arts
in Devon. There she met two great masters of experimental contemporary
dance: Steve Paxton, who co-founded the Judson Dance Theater with
Trisha
Brown in
New York in
the 1960s and who invented the dance practice of "contact improvisation";
and Mary Fulkerson, a founder of the “anatomical release technique”. Both
would have great influence on her work. Cathy Josefowitz graduated with a
degree in
performing arts
in 1983 with the choreographic composition
Fiesta Graduata,
which she created in collaboration with another student, Mara de Wit. They
were given high praise by the judges and continued their work by creating
the dance and theatre company Research and Navigation that same year in
Wales. Close to the
feminist
milieu and highly involved in the gay and lesbian liberation movement,
Cathy Josefowitz lived in a romantic relationship with a woman, Susan,
from 1983 to 1987. She composed and sang militant songs with dancing
friends under the group name Lining Time. She then studied choreography
in Amsterdam at the SNND (School for New Dance Development) in 1987.
In the early 1990s, she devoted herself to painting and worked on
several series of works on the themes of
animals
, transportation, and dance. It was also during this period that she began
her first monochromes inspired by the
nature
and
landscapes of
California,
especially Ojai, where she had stayed in 1990. In 1997, she met the
painter Colin Paul Mey and began to live with him. Ever more tied to the
body and gestures, her painting practice developed into creating very
large formats on the ground. From 1998 to 2000, she made a series of
abstract
and geometric works inspired by the colour and light of
her travels in Egypt
entitled
Prayers. In 2004, Cathy Josefowitz and her son moved to Geneva and
she continued to paint in a workshop in Carouge. She created black and
white monochromes, smaller format works that mixed
abstraction
and the figurative as well as techniques including painting and collages
of various subjects in an investigation that revisited themes from her
past paintings. In 2008 she created a series of canvases with four hands
painted over the course of a few months with Colin Paul Mey. This
pictorial and amorous game mixed their two practices with representations
of décor and stage sets. Then she returned to large format works in a
series of paintings on the theme of the Kama Sutra. Gradually, figures
would disappear to make room for almost monochromatic variations in large
formats. In 2011, Cathy Josefowitz and Mara de Wit relaunched Research and
Navigation, the company they founded in 1983. They explored the
relationship between dance and painting. Their year of work together
resulted in the movie
Fiesta Graduata Revisited. Over the course
of a few months at the end of 2012 and in 2013, shed painted many
paintings on the theme of Skies, in shades of grey and pink, whose
scenographic composition (as paintings in movement) she worked on with
Lorenzo Piqueras. Cathy Josefowitz died on June 28, 2014 in Geneva.
