Paintings can seduce, they can shock, they can whisper. I try to make the most direct and frank painting as possible, paintings that are so obviously being themselves.
Keltie Ferris
Keltie Ferris
Keltie Ferris’ new, large-format paintings display a combination of sprayed, hand-painted, impasto, and transparent color surfaces, raising the complex interplay between body, space and identity to an abstract level. As a former athlete, Ferris speaks of his painting as a “stage of the body” that is actively processed.
Keltie Ferris
U xxx Me, 2022
Oil and acrylic on canvas in the artist's frame
205,7 × 248,9 × 6,9 cm
I make the body print by coding myself in an edible or a non-toxic oil. And then I essentially lay a piece of paper flat on the ground. I press myself onto the ground onto this piece of paper and then I drizzle pigment over the paper and then shake it off and the pigment sticks to where there's oil. And in that process, creates oil paint and also creates an image.
The work "Chorus" consists of 14 bodyprints from the years 2019 until today. From the beginning, Keltie Ferris’ works are produced with reference to his body. He has been producing his series of “Body Prints” since 2015, a time when he was still a woman. One inevitably thinks of Yves Klein’s performances in the 1960s and the depiction of the body in art history. However Ferris body is always dressed in a jeans shirt and pants, which he covers with oil paint and presses against the paper, afterwards he scatters pigment dust over it. As prints of his body, they are literally an “index” of his subjective identity, while simultaneously embodying an array of possible gender identities. Seriality and repetition as part of the work process of the “Body Prints” transfer the representation of the body into the political sphere.
Almost all my paintings have some spray paint or spray to paint in it. I spray oil paint. It's colors that I've mixed and I spray it through an air gun attached to a compressor.
Keltie Ferris
Meow Mix, 2022
oil and acrylic on canvas in the artist's frame
106 × 93,35 × 6,35 cm
All paintings and maybe especially my paintings are a record of a body's interaction with a surface.
Keltie Ferris
The Poly Galactics, 2022
oil and acrylic on canvas in the artist's frame
190,2 × 190,2 × 7 cm
The large-format works, for example, “The Poly Galactics” play with the art-historical reference to the “grid” as it was taken up above all by Pop Art and later in the 1980s by Polke, as well. The grid as the symbol of halftone and the “infinite reproducibility” of artworks has been ironically cited by many painters during the history of art. For Keltie Ferris, the grid is an expression of our contemporary era and plays with the appearance of pixels in our digital image worlds. When taking a closer look, we recognize the illusion of sprayed lines that could disappear again at any moment.
Keltie Ferris’ (US 1977) works are part of renowned museum collections such as The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City or The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Oppenheimer Collection), Overland Park. In 2018 The Speed Art Museum in Kentucky dedicated a solo exhibition to Keltie Ferris. Recent solo exhibitions include "Body Prints and Paintings" at Gana Art Sounds, Seoul, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (both 2021), the University Art Museum at SUNY Albany, New York (2016) or "Keltie Ferris: Doomsday Boogie" at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2014). Currently his works are on view at the exhibition "Die unhintergehbare Verflechtung aller Leben", Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany.