Mezzanine Gallery

The Delaware Division of the Arts’ Mezzanine Gallery is pleased to present Interference, a solo exhibition of large-scale paintings by Wilmington artist Catharine Fichtner, on view November 6-30, 2026. An opening reception will be held Friday, November 6, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. in the Mezzanine Gallery, located in the Carvel State Office Building at 820 N. French Street, Wilmington. Admission is free and open to the public. (The Carvel State Office Building will be closed on Thursday, November 26 and Friday, November 27 in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday.)

Interference comes as Fichtner marks her recognition as a 2026 Delaware Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellow in the established artist category for painting.

Fichtner calls her approach “abstract narration.” Her paintings, she says, “grapple with how we find meaning within fragmented and coded information.” She has always been drawn to communication and memory that can deceive us, and to the ways we work through it. With technology that is so easy to manipulate, she sees life becoming more of a puzzle, one we all have to decipher.

Lace sits at the center of the work, and it’s personal. Her Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors made quilts by “saving every shred of fabric to create textiles that brightened their lives,” she says. Fichtner draws on that family history of quilt making, sewing, and tatting, a way of making lace by hand from a series of knots and loops. In her paintings, lace stands for family and lineage. Layered with digital references, it becomes a stand-in for the family and cultural stories we all carry, now broken into fragments.

Fichtner says she doesn’t like to look at other artists’ work too much. She would rather draw on “analog images, fabric, graffiti… random things that get my creative wheels turning.” Her process runs on experimentation and what she calls creative insecurity. Each painting starts in chaos and builds toward specifics as its meaning comes into focus.

Building a story into that process is the hard part. Fichtner calls it “the most challenging part of painting,” and she doesn’t run from the discomfort. “I don’t like the feeling of being off balance with a painting, but I know that this is where I need to be,” she says.

Near the end, she pushes the work into a loose narrative and gives it a title to help guide viewers in. Finishing a painting she has filled with meaning is her biggest reward, and she doesn’t walk away from one. As she puts it, “I will never give up on a painting.”

Her titles are worth reading closely. Redacted, Signals, Incoming, and Stay Tuned borrow the language of broadcasts and classified files, fitting clues for a show called Interference. The exhibition also includes Ripped Meridian, Loom, and Do You Want to Play House?

In Naughty or Nice? (2025), the exhibition’s signature image, lace patterns in hot pink, red, black, and gold pile up across a five-foot canvas and break off into blocks of bare white, while a thin white ring sweeps around the center. Six of the eight paintings in the show measure five feet square or larger, so this is work that’s worth seeing in person.

Catharine Fichtner is a painter who lives and works in Wilmington, Delaware. She grew up outside Philadelphia, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design for two years, and earned her bachelor’s degree at Tyler School of Art. After ten years in Newark and Wilmington, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University and spent thirty years living and working in Pittsburgh before returning to Delaware in 2023. Her early influences include abstract painters Milton Avery and Richard Diebenkorn. Her series Alterations (2019-2022) used lace, sewing, and the schematics of clothing patterns as “inspiration and armature on which to hang disguised narratives.” Her work has appeared in more than twenty solo and group exhibitions in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Delaware, including at the Delaware Art Museum, and is held in numerous private collections. Fichtner is a 2026 Delaware Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellow.

Couldn’t attend the gallery or just want to relive the experience? Check out our photo albums of each event on our Flickr account.