Keltie Ferris

“I like the feeling of looking through things to the world you can’t quite access, or a residue of a former world that you can’t quite get to, and I try to have that in my paintings” Keltie Ferris

  • K60, 2020, Wilhelm-Hallen, Berlin / Photo: Trevor Good

  • FEEEEELING, 2021, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

  • FEEEEELING, 2021, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

  • *O*P*E*N*, 2018, Speed Art Museum, Louisville

  • *O*P*E*N*, 2018, Speed Art Museum, Louisville

  • *O*P*E*N*, 2018, Speed Art Museum, Louisville

  • *O*P*E*N*, 2018, Speed Art Museum, Louisville

  • Exclamation Point, 2016, Klemm’s, Berlin

About the artist

Keltie Ferris’s paintings need no theme, context, or network in order to develop their force and meaning. They reveal their influences and are independent, reconceived and freely conceived. Functioning according to a logic of their own, they capture on canvas the plethora of information and visuals, the overload, the pressure, and ‘all that jazz’ surrounding us, asserting it all with the subtle use of the familiar. This is painting for painting’s sake; it develops its depth and objective ‘critical potential’ emphatically and without naiveté.

Ferris is known for his expressive geometric color fields that synthesize an array of schools of painting, ranging from early modernist schools, to Abstract Expressionism, to street art and graffiti on his large signature canvases and in his recent Body prints on paper. With a specific oil-based, air-brush technique and marks from other tools such as palette-knives, the artist constructs his abstract language and layers of distinct, rich textures on his paintings, simultaneously inscribing and removing his own presence on canvas.

Multilayered, and informed by spheres outside the classical realm of painting, referencing sculpture, media, and even performance, Ferris’s works can be understood as deliberately hybrid in nature. They go beyond abstraction, bearing an atmosphere in which physical presence merges with the qualities of the painting materials he employs.

“The conflation of such extremely contrasting techniques in Ferris’s new paintings has an extraordinary effect. From a distance the paintings read as complex and dynamic painterly spatial structures. But, closer-up, they read as the physical composites that they are.” David Rhodes, 2018

Publications