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.

Jay Kelly’s work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The British Museum, London England; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; JP Morgan Chase, New York, NY; among others. Kelly’s work is in the Sarah-Ann and Werner Kramarsky collection at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, Spain. His work was also included in What is a Line? Drawings from the Collection at Yale University Art Gallery, along with work by Richard Serra, Brice Marden, and Carl Andre.

For more information please contact Dru Arstark at [email protected] or Sarah Bielicky at [email protected].