Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly (b. 1956) is one of the most distinctive contemporary American painters working today, whose sophisticated abstractions bring together the deep material traditions of Eastern and Western art, the layered surfaces of historical print culture, and the reductive discipline of postwar American abstraction. Influenced by a myriad of disparate and iconic artists including Constantin Brancusi, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Diebenkorn, and Ellsworth Kelly, Kelly creates art that is intelligent, alert, harmonious, and yet quietly paradoxical, drawing on unexpected sources and combinations to produce a body of work that stands apart from most contemporary painting.

Kelly's practice is grounded in his extensive international travels, from which he returns with unexpected materials that become the foundation of his layered compositions. Incorporating printed antique papers, documents, signs, and vintage posters, Kelly builds up panels that are then covered with saturated pigments, so that the remnants of his source materials and the history and language they impart are preserved in new modern ways. Paint is applied with puzzle-like precision, in shapes that capture strong lines, forms, and color. These are sophisticated works that carefully meld the past with the modern and the new, arriving at an elegance that speaks with genuine authority. Kelly is especially mindful of how the shapes in his work interact with each other, and the compositional relationships between forms remain central to the visual and emotional life of each painting.

Kelly's major bodies of work include his celebrated Tantra paintings, which draw on Indian devotional imagery, and his Orillas series, meditations on the coastal shore that translate geographical and spiritual thresholds into deeply worked surfaces. Based in New York and traveling widely, Kelly has exhibited internationally throughout his career, and his paintings are held in significant public and private collections around the world. His practice continues to develop as one of the most sustained and thoughtful contemporary explorations of what layered abstract painting can carry within it.

"Much like a stonemason building a wall, my recent work seems to be anchored in a step-by-step process of composing formal puzzles. I have grown fond of the pared-down tools of line, form and color and the bountiful yield of their juxtapositions, without the need of references or symbolic otherness to give them meaning. The tension of exquisite junctions and disjunctions achieved by a process of patient build-up of papered and painted layers and edge-to-edge arrangements, makes for a fine focus of meditative work. Though the work has formal and austere footings the efforts of edit and re-edit seems to create sensual surfaces that expose a history of tactile decisions. My affection for the likes of Hans Arp, Myron Stout, Tony Smith, Brancusi, Calder and Ellsworth Kelly, plus the Bauhaus Gang, coupled with over 20 years of crafting the surfaces I paint on, gives me a small niche in this intimate investigation of form that I can call my own."

—Robert Kelly