After 3 decades in a private collection we are please to present 9 of Jay Kelly’s photo-realist paintings from the 1980s.
Including artists, Christiane Baumgartner, Christopher Beane, Mel Bochner, Long-Bin Chen, Jeff Chyatte, Lin Emery, Rinaldo Frattolillo, Charlie Hewitt, Jasper Johns, Jay Kelly, Manuel Knapp, Suzanne Levesque, Jerry Mischak, David Mitchell, Jacob Ouillette, Robert Petersen, Jenna Pirello, Robert Rauschenberg, Kevin Scott, Boaz Vaadia, Jim Watt, Stanley Whitney and more!
Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent drawings and paintings by gallery artist Jay Kelly. Jay Kelly celebrates clean and fundamentally abstract forms, with a minimalist sensibility. This will be Kelly’s first show of abstract paintings, having worked in small scale sculpture and drawing for many years. Applying oil on linen stretched over 8 x 8” and 11 x 8” irregularly-shaped wood frames, Kelly creates rich, hazy-colored fields and translucent layers bisected by crisp abstract shapes. His recent sculptures, made of wire, nickel silver, wood, gesso, acrylic, and Japanese paper, are no larger than 10” tall. Loosely inspired by Modernist design, these works possess a quiet grace. Structural woven metal shapes, diaphanous Japanese paper nets, and smooth, nonreferential forms are aged with a patina which reflects Kelly’s love for weathered surfaces.
For more information, please email info@JimKempner.com
Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce Jay Kelly’s new exhibition Twenty Years of Drawing & Sculpture. The exhibition will feature a selection of the artist’s early work from 1997 up to his recent sculptures and drawings from 2017. The exhibition will be on view from January 18th through March 4th, 2018. An opening reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, January 18th, from 6-8 pm.
For more information, please contact us at info@jimkempner.com
Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by gallery artists Jay Kelly and Greg Parker. The exhibition will feature recent drawings and sculptures by Jay Kelly, as well as new paintings by Greg Parker, and will be on view from April 14th- May 29th, 2016.
For more information, please contact us at info@jimkempner.com
Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce its tenth solo exhibition with Jay Kelly. The exhibition of small scale sculptures and drawings will be on display at the gallery from September 13th through October 25th, 2014. An opening reception for the artist will be held on September 13th from 6-8 pm. There will be a full-color catalogue to accompany the show.
Jay Kelly began his career as a photorealist painter who shifted his focus towards abstraction in the late 90’s. Moving away from his remarkably rendered realist paintings, Kelly’s practice evolved into a completely anti-representational body of work. With a special emphasis on sculpture, the work in this exhibition showcases his refinement of a nonrepresentational style he developed in the 1990’s. With a deft execution of materials such as metal, wood, nickel silver, gesso, Japanese paper and acrylic paint, Kelly creates a vast world of miniature abstract forms, the largest being only 24” with many under 8” in height. The sculptures play on the human psyche and will be presented in the gallery space as a community of biomorphic, organic and oddly referential constructions. Calling to mind the work of Martin Puryear, Paul Klee, Alexander Calder, and Tim Burton, the work’s clean lines and minimal aesthetic also allude to 20th century modernist architecture and furniture.
The same meticulous and controlled elements are employed in the artist’s 5 x 5” drawings of acrylic, graphite, pastel, colored pencil and/or gouache works on vellum. The rhythmic and dynamic arrangements of line and color reveal a flawless control of line and a balance of asymmetrical forms.
For more information, please contact us at info@jimkempner.com
Jim Kempner Fine Art announces an exhibition of Jay Kelly’s recent drawings and sculpture, his ninth solo show at the gallery.
Continuing his exploration of making objects, Kelly, a self-taught, former photorealist painter of industrial landscapes, brings his attention to detail and love of weathered, aged surfaces to his intricately constructed sculpture. Kelly’s abstract wire sculptures are delicate constructions in space and have a light, playful quality. Others, made with silver nickel, wood, and gesso are aged with patina and are more compact in appearance, only reaching up to 8 inches in height. Kelly has expanded beyond his traditional miniature format to include sculptural works as large as 2 feet high. Regardless of scale, Kelly’s handcrafted precision is evident in all his work.
Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by Jay Kelly from November 23rd through December 23rd. Executed in pastel and graphite on vellum, the intimate nature of these small-scale minimalist works on paper draws the viewer into a world of pure, simplified geometric shapes and subtle tones. Concurrently, there will be an exhibition of prints by Ed Ruscha. The gallery is located at 501 West 23 Street (corner 10th Avenue and 23rd Street). Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6.
Jay Kelly continues to distill the essence of balance and harmony of modernist architecture and design from the 1950s and early '60s in these new drawings, as he deftly plays variations on opaque and translucent rectangles of color. The artist, who grew up in New Jersey, is influenced by the architecture that surrounds him; his interest in industrial landscapes is very apparent:
“Even as a child,” Kelly says, “I loved the industrial landscapes around Newark. The rusty barrels and old trucks weren’t just barrels and trucks; they were graphic elements and colors that fascinated me.”
Kelly’s artistic style began in the form of photorealistic watercolors. He would painstakingly capture every detail of the urban landscapes he had become so taken with which would sometimes take months to finish. Four years ago he began experimenting with his current style, producing photorealistic watercolors by day and geometric drawings on translucent vellum at night. For the time being, he has abandoned his realist style and works almost exclusively in the realm of geometric abstraction.
When asked Kelly will dispute that there is any contradiction in his two approaches. His subjects are still the ethereal landscapes of his youth. His geometric forms are simply the old trucks and barrels reduced to their basic forms. According to Kelly,
“I’m working in a different way now but I don’t think I’ve moved very far at all.”
Jay Kelly’s work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The British Museum. For further information and visuals, please contact us at info@jimkempner.com or call us at 212-206-6872.
Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent drawings by Jay Kelly from September 15 to October 20. Executed in pastel and graphite on vellum, these small, seductive minimalist works are subtle distillations of pure geometric forms. This will be the artist's second solo show at the gallery. Jim Kempner Fine Art is located at 501 West 23rd Street (entrance at Tenth Avenue). Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6; and by appointment.
In his second solo show at Jim Kempner Fine Art, Kelly continues to investigate modes of abstraction, a process he began approximately four years ago in what seemed a significant departure from the photorealism of his previous paintings and watercolors of industrial sites. However, with his luminous new drawings -- sleek, silvery graphite and muted pastels on translucent vellum -- what he is doing is "simplifying and concentrating, eliminating the unnecessary, as Hans Hoffman once suggested, rather than exchanging representation for abstraction. His most recent sequence of postcard size images (3" x 6" or 5" x 5") floated on a white ground, situates his imagery in less fixed, more ambiguous territory where scale is relative -- a quarter inch might equal the universe--and space is equivocal. Many of the drawings are diptychs, a monochrome panel sometimes crossed by the thinnest of lines paired with a panel containing a few geometric figures -- circular and oval rings, open squares and rectangles, a stream of dashes -- that appear to overlap and are slightly out-of-focus at the edges. The imagery, still representational as well as abstract, evokes formalist ghosts as well as biological, cosmological or encoded, electronic phenomena, precise within an imprecise field. Kelly's measured, sensitized drawings comment on the ideologies and aesthetics of modernism, postmodernism and beyond. Small miracles of form, color and light, they also comment persuasively on the subtleties and pleasures of perception (Lilly Wei, 2001)."
Jay Kelly has exhibited at Graystone Gallery in San Francisco and at O.K. Harris in New York. Examples of his new work have recently been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The British Museum, and the noted Minimalist drawing collector, Werner Kramarsky.
For further information please contact us at 212-206-6872.
Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Minimalennialism, a large group show of 21st Century Minimalist paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture by over 15 artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Jay Kelly, Sol Lewitt, Julia Mangold, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Wes Mills, Greg Parker, Carole Seborovski and others. The dates of the show are March 31 through May 5, 2001. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 31 from 6-8 pm. The gallery is located at 501 West 23rd Street (entrance on Tenth Avenue). Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6, and Sunday by appointment.
Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, formally reductive abstraction was employed by a range of artists who worked with similar vocabularies, but to radically different ends. Many artists working today continue the exploration of simplified form and color, the repetition of elements, objectifying the painting as object, and the universal "purity" of spirit of the minimalist esthetic.
Highlights by younger artists include the small, seductive minimalist drawings by Jay Kelly executed in pastel and graphite on vellum; the more austere grid and geometric form paintings by Greg Parker done in oil, pigment and graphite; the spare, poetic paintings and drawings by Wes Mills; and the severe steel sculptures by Greg Corn and Julia Mangold.
Featured works among the "minimalist masters" are Ellsworth Kelly's recent prints of boldly colored simplified curves published by Gemini; a set of seven small woodcuts by Robert Mangold, which accompany his recently editioned catalogue raisonne published by Parasol Press; and a charcoal grey and orange curvilinear drawing by Sol Lewitt.
Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent drawings by Jay Kelly from March 11 through April 16. Executed in pastel and graphite on vellum, these small, seductive minimalist works are subtle distillations of pure geometric forms. This will be the artist's first solo show at the gallery. Jim Kempner Fine Art is located at 501 West 23rd Street (entrance at Tenth Avenue). Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10-6; and Sunday from 12-5.
Known as a photorealist painter of industrial landscapes, in his recent abstract work, Kelly pares down the fundamental visual elements in architecture and landscape to their purest essence of color and shape. The drawings, which measure from 3 x 6" to 5 x 5," are subtle in coloration, have a soft, diffuse, serene quality, and emanate light and depth. From a review of a recent show in San Francisco, one critic writes:
..Some patterns bring to mind the striations we have learned to associate with forensic DNA testing. Others suggest fence posts against a field of snow...
The art of Kelly's drawings is in activating a very small working space without giving scale to what happens within it. Though Kelly's pieces have not a trace of turbulence, the eye is always at sea in them....
Jay Kelly has exhibited at Graystone Gallery in San Francisco and at O.K. Harris in New York. Examples of his new work have recently been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
For further information or visuals, please contact us at 212-206-6872.
