Tatiana Rathke
Loretto Wander, 2023
Acrylic on Canvas
8" x 8"
 
Artist Bio
Tatiana Rathke is a Louisville-based visual artist whose abstract paintings emerge through improvisational mark-making, layered color relationships, and bodily gesture. Working intuitively and without predetermined compositions, she builds paintings through accumulation, response, revision, and play, allowing each mark to influence the next. Her works function as spaces for grounding, experimentation, and embodied attention. Originally trained in photography and visual art at Bellarmine University, where she graduated in 2013, Rathke’s background in photography and continued work in commercial visual production influence her sensitivity to framing, rhythm, lighting, and visual composition, while painting offers a more physical and improvisational relationship to image-making. Many of the paintings in this body of work were created during a period of deep engagement with nature and daily studio practice while attending a residency at the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse in Kentucky. Immersed in the surrounding landscape, Rathke spent extended time away from digital distraction, painting daily to the sounds of the natural environment, nearby musicians, and classical music. Through layered surfaces, looping forms, and intuitive color mixing, the paintings hold tension between spontaneity and structure, softness and intensity, chaos and repair. In recent years, motherhood has further shaped her relationship to identity, care, and artistic process, leading her to explore the work of mother artists through both community and material perspectives. This shift has expanded her practice across digital and physical mediums, with an increasing interest in flexible, intuitive forms of making that exist alongside the rhythms of daily life and caregiving. Alongside her studio practice, Rathke is deeply invested in collaborative and community-centered creative work. Through support from the Great Meadows Foundation, she has pursued research-driven travel focused on contemporary art, public space, and material-based practices, including studying temporary public art environments through the Art Shanty Projects in Minneapolis, attending the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel, and traveling to San Francisco to research the work and legacy of Ruth Asawa. In 2022, she also served as an Artist in Residence with the Louisville Free Public Library, leading public workshops focused on creativity, nature, and accessible art-making.