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.