Sophie Matisse Mixed Media

Meredith Walker's “All Living Things” is a stunning example of contemporary folk art that blends botanical motifs and symbolic imagery to evoke a sense of interconnectedness and harm...

Robert Kelly (American, 1956-) Abstract Mixed Media on paper Study for Alma 1983 Pencil titled Hand signed lower right Dimensions: Frame: 26 X 19 Image: 24 X 17.5 Robert Kelly (born 1956) is an American artist. He is based in New York City. Kelly was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and studied at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (B.A. 1978). His paintings have been acquired by public and private collections in Europe and the United States, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Smith College Art Museum, Northampton MA; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutger’s University, NJ; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery; The Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. Kelly has traveled throughout the United States, Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and Nepal. His work often incorporates unusual materials from his journeys, among them vintage posters and printed antique paper, obscured and layered in saturated pigments on a canvas faintly scored with irregular grids. Kelly’s paintings have been likened to palimpsests and his method described as one of building “meticulously on inhabited ground, layering materials, documents, and signs, covering them, wiping out their beauty, nearly, but allowing something of the labor and their languages to persist.” Kelly worked as a commercial photographer for Polaroid in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and completed residencies at The MacDowell Colony and The Karolyi Foundation, Vence, France, before devoting himself entirely to painting in 1982. His work has been the subject of more than forty-five solo shows at venues in North America and Europe, including Spazio Bianco/AR Contemporary Art, Milan, Italy; Leslie Feely Fine Art, New York; and The John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, California. He has participated in more than one hundred group shows in the United States and abroad. including the Projects Inaugural Exhibition at Bentley Gallery Featuring works by Jim Dine, Jennifer Bartlett, Donald Sultan, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain, Julian Schnabel and, Dominique Blain. Kelly’s influences include the De Stijl movement, Malevich and Mondrian and modernists like Bauhaus, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Philip Guston, Richard Diebenkorn, Kurt Schwitters, Blinky Palermo and Brazilian Neo-Concretists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. Kelly himself cites Hans Arp, Myron Stout, Tony Smith, Brancusi, Calder, Bill Traylor, Louise Bourgeois, and Ellsworth Kelly. Primary Abstraction, Process-Oriented, Hard-Edged, New York School Artists, Line, Form, and Color, Curvilinear Forms. “Kelly compares his work method to the practice of a stonemason building a wall, setting the components in place as they rise with an astuteness and precision found in the process of composing formal puzzles. Addressing the full expanse of a canvas covered entirely with paper, he masterfully builds up his surface with the pared down tools of line, form and color. Given their remarkable elegance, sheen and tactile qualities, the paintings invite drop-dead awe.” Edward Leffingwell, Robert Kelly: Paper Trails “In these works the sophisticated play between translucency and opacity, representation and abstraction conflates past and present—be it the history of art or of a psyche.” Hilarie M. Sheets, Art in America “[His] process yields the self-sustaining and harmonious ‘rightness’ of so much of Kelly’s work, a sense that each form could never be other than it is; were it sharper, more obtuse, or thicker, each angle, curve, or horizontal band would collapse into formlessness. Kelly’s compositions are held in such perfect moments of balance...” João Ribas, Robert Kelly: Praxis and Poesis “The works are paradoxical: by disassembling and then reassembling the pieces, Kelly seems to undermine visual ‘completeness’ by a fragmented presentation. Yet it nonetheless feels as though the image is a cohesive whole.” Melissa Kuntz, Art in America “Confronted as all artists are now with the exhaustion of subjectivity, Robert Kelly insists on the capacity of painting to mediate subjective apprehension through symbolic forms and sensual experience. Nothing less.” Lyle Rexer, Robert Kelly: Painting’s Place “Robert Kelly’s art is exemplary. It reveals an intelligence that is as alert and modern as one could wish but is at the same time saturated in the knowledge of other times and places.” John Ash...

Watercolour & gouache on paper Nino Tolomashvili is a Georgian painter born in 2003 who lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. After completing her schooling, she pursued her studies...

Lamar Briggs Untitled color abstraction, ca. 2008 Mixed media oil and gouache on paper Hand signed by Lamar Briggs on the lower center front Frame included: held in the original off ...

Meredith Walker’s "Memory Stack I" is a luminous work of contemporary folk art that combines symbolic imagery with a meditative simplicity. This original acrylic and gouache painting...

Falling Towards Myself is a conteporary large-scale multicolored abstract painting with dramatic shades of Kelly green, vibrant cobalt lapis blue, yellow, ochre, peach and pale mint ...

“CUT WORK” is an evolving examination of emotion experienced through the inspired meeting of blade and paper. Beginning with the featureless plane of a blank paper canvas and a surge...

Max Manning is a Houston-based painter whose practice he describes as “algorithmic abstraction”, studio-built systems that he deliberately disrupts to create compositions where loose...

“CUT WORK” is an evolving examination of emotion experienced through the inspired meeting of blade and paper. Beginning with the featureless plane of a blank paper canvas and a surge...

With its extra-large dimension and joyful composition this painting by American artist Martha Holden is a rare piece. It is a contemporary abstract that ...

Michael Jay Knigin (American, 1942 – 2011) Untitled (abstract) Mixed media painting on paper, includes acrylic, watercolor and gouache Estate stamp on the ...

Italo Scanga (Italian American 1932-2001) Mixed Media (with hand painted sculpture frame) Charcoal, gouache, acrylic paint, paper 1987-1988 Dimensions: Measures 26.5" x 20.5" x .75" framed. Hand signed and dated in the lower right corner. Provenance: On the back, there is writing to indicate this piece was included in a 1990 showing at Chico State's University Art Gallery. This painting and painted frame by Italo Scanga, epitomizes the characteristics of his oeuvre. It features a face and cypress tree. Polychrome and vibrant art from the Memphis Milano era. Italo Scanga (June 6, 1932 - July 7, 2001), an Italian-born American artist, was known for his sculptures, prints and, paintings, mostly created from found objects. In his youth in Calabria, Italy he worked as a cabinetmaker's apprentice and studies sculpture with a man who carved statues of saints. Italo Scanga was an innovative neo Dada, neo-Expressionist, and neo-Cubist multimedia artist who made assemblage, collage, sculptures of ordinary objects and created prints, glass, and ceramic works. Modern Italian abstract geometric folk art. Scanga's materials included natural objects like branches and seashells, as well as kitsch figurines, castoff musical instruments and decorative trinkets salvaged from flea markets and thrift shops. He combined these ingredients into free-standing assemblages, which he then painted. Although visually ebullient, the results sometimes referred to gruesome episodes from Greek mythology or the lives and deaths of martyred saints. He considered his artistic influences to be sweepingly pan-cultural, from African sculpture, to Cubism to Giorgio de Chirico. He often collaborated with the sculptor Dale Chihuly, who was a close friend. Constructed of wood and glass, found objects or fabric, his ensembles reflect a trio of activities—working, eating, and praying. These activities dominate the lives of those who live close to the land, but they are also activities that are idealized by many who contemplate, romantically, a simpler, bucolic life. Italo graduated from Michigan State University where he befriended fellow artists Richard Merkin and David Pease. He studied under Lindsey Decker...