Bio

Kate Yesberg is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based artist who took up her art practice after a career in the law and in government with Treasury. She graduated with an LLB from Victoria University, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and then studied as a Fulbright scholar at New York University, where she graduated with an LLM in Environmental law.

Her work explores geometric structure as a metaphor for intrinsic energy. The work Nina XIV (2022) in Te Haerenga Collection displays kinship with a range of artists who have worked in this wider field of activated form, such as early-twentieth-century century pioneering Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint and Don Driver in Aotearoa New Zealand. Nina XIV addresses concepts of acceptance and resistance. Yesberg is an artist at the beginning of her artistic journey, having started exhibiting in 2020. It is a goal of Te Haerenga Collection to support young artists such as Kate Yesberg.

Te Haerenga Collection curator Hamish Coney chose this painting on seeing Yesberg’s work for the first time at {Suite} Gallery in 2022. ‘Most of the artists in Te Haerenga are well known to me, many with at least a decade’s exhibition history and curatorial engagement. Kate’s work was unknown to me until the moment I entered the gallery. I was taken with her works’ radiant energy, crystalline forms and vivid colours. I arrived “cold” and without any preconceptions, as one does for every artist’s work one encounters for the first time. Nina XIV struck me as a work by a new voice that has a clarity and confidence. When I then understood that these works carry a personal sadness that relates to the artist’s several miscarriages, I was more than touched. That such works could form part of a healing process impressed me as packing a punch. To be wowed by seeing a new talent emerging and then becoming aware of the emotion that powers these works makes them metaphors for an intimate form of courage. Frequently, things are not quite what they seem.’

Kate is a past chair of the registered charity Yellow Brick Road, which supports families dealing with mental health challenges.

Exhibitions

• 2024   {Suite} Wellington, Te Whanganui-a-Tara: Fortune
• 2023   {Suite} Ponsonby, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Levi I – VII
• 2022   {Suite} Wellington, Te Whanganui-a-Tara: Nina XVIII – XXIV
• 2022   {Suite} Ponsonby, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Nina XIII – XVII
• 2021   {Suite} Wellington, Te Whanganui-a-Tara: Nina
• 2021   {Suite} Ponsonby, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Kate Yesberg and Geoffrey Notman