KTW ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: THE UNCANNY ENERGY OF KELTIE FERRIS’S ABSTRACTIONS

By Michael Phillips

In the time of the Coronavirus, galleries and interactive art exhibits have moved to show their collections in digital spaces. Art Basel, one of the foremost global events for art buying, trading and auctioning, was, for the first time ever, held virtually in March. 

Because of the increasing severity of COVID-19’s spread, the major event, scheduled this time of the year to take place in Hong Kong, provided guests, buyers and sellers access to its linked galleries and displays safely through its website. If you happened to catch some of the virtual exhibitions, you likely would have spotted one of the event’s now-perennial highlights: the work of Keltie Ferris.

Coming of Age with Picasso

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1977, Ferris has paved the way in modern abstraction in the contemporary art world. From a young age, she was given a platform to explore her creative energy through the encouragement of her family. According to a 2012 feature in Interview, Ferris comes from a long line of painters and artists from her father’s half of the family, “the last of whom died in the Holocaust.” 

From the time she was in preschool, she was able to intimately experience the work of masters like Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger from the private collections of her family’s friends. Living in Louisville until age 18, she still considers the city and the Commonwealth “a very gentle place,” according to an interview she gave to Flaunt. 

These formative experiences shaped her plunge into abstract painting, which she would develop throughout the course of her career.

Surge, courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Yale, Ferris attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She then moved to Brooklyn and began crafting props for different productions, from general stage pieces to angel wings for Victoria’s Secret runway models. Growing disillusioned with that kind of work, she reentered the academic world and earned an M.F.A. at the Yale School of Art in 2006.

Mastering Abstraction

Since then, her profile in the visual arts scene has exploded, and she is now known for her large-scale abstract paintings and wide-ranging use of media and application techniques. Using aerosol paint, acrylics, pastels and sprayed on oils, Ferris creates captivating arrangements of color and marks that seem reminiscent of something familiar to the audience, but not quite.

In 2014 she was awarded the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.he has since displayed her work in the private collections of the Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery, the Saatchi Gallery, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

Many of her paintings call to mind blurred images of city lights at night, layers of graffiti in a New York alleyway, even pixelated shapes from a 1980s videogame—all things the artist has admitted inspire her. These abstracted images, for Ferris, convey energy on the canvas. 

She’s stated that, “My work tries to include these things—the objectness, a sense of scale, a sense of the hand—all of those things are exciting to me, and I want to keep them all alive.” Outside of her usual visual lexicon, Ferris also has an ongoing series of body prints in which she substitutes her brush with herself, covering her body in pigment and oil pressing into the canvas.

“I think of my paintings as a sort of imaginative reality that someone has spent a lot of time in. It’s not just codes and numbers, it’s sexy and embarrassing, and it’s also emotional. My paintings tend toward the euphoric and positive. I guess that’s just my personality. It’s how I am, and how they are.”

Prince, courtesy of Ruckus

Keltie Ferris’s rise to celebrity in the art world makes more sense when you consider the creative ecosystem from which she came. Contrary to popularly held misconceptions that still plague the state’s intellectual and cultural reputation, Kentucky has cultivated a culture focused on the promotion of artistic invention, a feat proven by the global impact of those coming from or connected to it. 

Back in October 2019, Kentucky to the World invited Tony Moore, celebrated comic book artist and founding illustrator of The Walking Dead, to talk more directly about how the Bluegrass State has created an architecture for artistic exploration. Watch the conversation between Moore and University of Louisville Professor Joe Turner, streaming through KET, and find out how Kentucky is producing some of the world’s leading artists.