Jim Kempner Fine Art Presents
Weekly Windows
Jim Watt’s Weekly Window Installation
Summer 2020
Jenna Pirello
Jenna Pirello’s practice explores the interaction between the external and the internal, allowing for a meditative practice within our current bustling sociopolitical climate. Starting with black grounds, each layer of vivacious color is then built up and scraped away to create a highly complex and tactile surface. Through this additive and subtractive process, Pirello’s serial method of mark making is highlighted and allows the viewer to get lost in her abstract language. Pirello currently lives and works in Portland, ME. She received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2014 and was awarded a Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA in 2018. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions throughout Boston, MA and Portland, ME. Since her first solo exhibition with JKFA in 2018, critics and art world publications have chosen to highlight Pirello as a new artistic talent to watch.
Above: Breakdown, 2020. Acrylic on wood. 24 x 20 x 1”. Far left: Install shot from Pirello’s 2019 solo show at Jim Kempner Fine Art, Honey Honey Hi. Left: Right Down the Line, 2019. Acrylic on wood panel. 40 x 30 x 1”.
Jay Kelly
Jay Kelly’s small-scale sculptures and drawings are recognized for their whimsicality and enigmatic origins. They share a lightness of form and an acute sense of proportion and color. His drawings are made with graphite, pastel, and colored pencil on vellum, and consist of linear arrangements that appear to float in space. No larger than 12” tall, his sculptures are a combination of wire, nickel silver, wood, gesso and paint with textures that vary from woven wire, spiky protrusions, diaphanous Japanese paper nets and smooth, non-referential wooden forms.
“All of these works have a Klee-like sense of spiritual play; though engaging and enjoyable, they never lose their essential seriousness.” –Sculpture Magazine, 2011
Jay Kelly is a self-taught artist living and working in New York City. He began his career as a photorealist painter, shifting his focus to pure abstraction in the late 1990s. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The British Museum, London, England; The Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; the San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA; The Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; JP Morgan Chase, New York, NY; Fidelity Investments, New York, NY; and many other private and public collections.
Clockwise from top: Untitled #1984, 2020. Oil on gessoed vellum mounted on museum board. Board: 11 x 15”. Image: 5 x 9”; Sculpture group shot; Untitled #1928, 2018. Pastel and graphite on vellum. Image size: 5 x 5’’. Paper size: 11 x 11”; Install shot from Kelly’s 2018 solo show, Twenty Years of Drawing and Sculpture
Jim Watt
Jim Watt is an American artist and architect based in New Jersey. Watt’s paintings and drawings are an obsessive exploration of space, form, and material, a context that marries his work as a practicing architect. At Princeton University, where Watt earned his M.A. in Architecture, teachers Michael Graves and Enrique Miralles espoused the Renaissance notion that architects must paint, draw, and sculpt to fully realize their ideas. Form, space, material, texture, color, and light are shared languages that transcend medium. Watt’s work as an artist is the opportunity to work without a structured, planned intention, instead playing on the tension between thought and instinct: discovery through the process of making. Watt’s completed architectural projects span North America and have been featured in publications such as Dwell Magazine and The New York Times. His art work is in private collections in North America and Europe.
Clockwise from Top: Theme and Variation X, 2020. Oil on canvas. 24 x 30”; Theme and Variation III, 2019. Oil on canvas. 72 x 48”; 100 Watercolors for Spring #86, 2020. Watercolor on paper. 9 x 12”; 100 Watercolors for Spring #58, 2020. Watercolor on paper. 9 x 12”.
Christopher Beane
Christopher Beane is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and has a background in portrait and figurative photography. Through work in New York City’s bright and offbeat flower market, Beane became obsessed with the botanical. Beginning with traditional, abstract and black & white compositions in the 1990s, Beane’s early works make reference to a number of noted photographers but also reveal how he developed his own eye for presenting unusual floral shapes and textures. Beane’s color work is truly his own: creative and evocative in a manner unlike what one typically finds in the sensual photography of pistils and stamens and pretty petals. In his representations you find more abstract emotion, perhaps evoking flames and mysterious sea creatures... as well as gasp-worthy ultra macro depictions of familiar subjects. After mastering a particular motif, Beane deconstructs and reinvents his approach and summons up entirely new perspectives, new ways to infuse form with color. His more formal flower portraits, on darker grounds, play with a reduced color palette in an entirely new way and remain true to the subject in their more subdued presentation. Beane’s personal and artistic journey is both inspiring and colorful. Christopher
Clockwise from Top: September Dahlias (Baroquecoco 2019), 2019. Flex chromogenic prrint. 45 x 36”. Edition 3.; Two Toned Summer Flowers (Baroquecoco Series), 2019. Flex chromogenic print. 45 x 36”. Edition 3. ; Cafe au Lait with Crimson Dahlias (Baroquecoco Series), 2018. Flex chromogenic print. 23 x 18”. Edition 3.
Stay Tuned! Stay tuned as we continue to feature our gallery artists through the summer. We hope that frequent installations in our front window will provide nearby clients and visitors a sociallydistanced way to interact with us. Tag us in your photos of our Weekly Windows on Instagram @jimkempnerfineart!