Robert Kelly (b. 1956, Santa Fe, New Mexico) works primarily in painting and is best known for his collaged geometric compositions. Influenced by the Bauhaus artists and Modernists such as Paul Klee and Kurt Schwitters, his work is primarily concerned with formalism. Kelly takes a poetic approach to create abstract work. He views each shape in his compositions as physical forms and imagines their weight and balance in relation to the rest of the composition. Working within formal puzzles that he sets up for himself, Kelly often investigates an idea of doubleness in his work. He has a twin brother, and he considers the closeness associated with twins as he constructs his compositions, using forms and shapes that reflect and/or oppose each other. Kelly received a BA from Harvard University in 1978 and has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1983. Kelly’s work has been acquired by many public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, Fogg Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Margulies Collection, McNay Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. Robert Kelly lives and works in New York, New York.
Drawing on his extensive travels, Robert Kelly’s painted collages contain found print and material from around the world. Kelly has included antique botanical drawings, handwritten notes, small sketches, vintage posters, and signs in his work. To create the ground for his paintings, he lays the re-appropriated paper in long strips to form irregular grids, small squares, and triangles. The repeated application of paper often obscures the printed content beyond recognition. “I have grown fond of the pared-down tools of line, form, and color and the bountiful yield of their juxtapositions, without the need of references or symbolic otherness to give them meaning,” he has said. Having laid the ground, he paints abstract geometric shapes and meandering lines in oil and gouache. In an effort to complicate the notion of a completed work, Kelly has deconstructed many of his canvases and rearranged them into abstract assemblages.
