Kate Macfarlane is a curator and writer based in London. She studied art history and education at Cambridge University (1979-83) and began her career in the public visual arts sector in 1984 at Riverside Studios. There, she curated exhibitions of, amongst others, Bethan Huws, Tim Rollins + K.O.S and Ilya Kabakov. She co-founded Drawing Room in 2000 and since that time has co-devised the organisations vision and programme. Alongside her extensive curatorial work she has edited 14 Drawing Room titles, most recently ‘Graphology: drawing from automatism and automation’ co-published with ARA.MER, Ghent and M HKA, Antwerp and ‘The Peripatetic School: Itinerant Drawing from Latin America’, co-published with Ridinghouse, London. Her writings on contemporary drawing include: ‘David Musgrave: Faulty Images’, Tate Papers, Issue 15 (2011), ‘Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing’, Jack Southern & Mick Maslen (eds.) (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011); ‘Drawing off the page’, in A. Lammert et al (eds.), Räume der Zeichhnung (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2007); ‘Investigating the Status of Drawing’, ‘The Drawing Book’, Tania Kovats (ed), (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005).
Recent exhibitions include ‘Graphic Witness’ at Drawing Room, ‘Line’ at Lisson Gallery, London, and ‘Dove Allouche – Mea Culpa of a Sceptic’, The Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris. She contributed a chapter to ‘A Companion to Contemporary Drawing’, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2018.
