Keltie Ferris

American, b. 1977, Louisville, KY, United States, based in Brooklyn, NY, United States

New York-based artist Keltie Ferris covers her mostly large-scale canvases with layers of spray paint and hand-painted geometric fields, creating the effect of brightly colored digital screens dissolving into pixels. "Paintings can seduce, they can shock, they can whisper," she says. "I try to make the most direct and frank painting as possible, paintings that are so obviously being themselves." While Ferris's work frequently evokes references to Tron, The Matrix, and other sci-fi movies, the use of technology is mostly absent from her painterly, hands-on process. As The New Yorker once described: "Picture Monet's garden as a graffiti-tagged plot in Bushwick and you get some sense of the grit, bravado, and beauty of these big abstract paintings made of oil, spray paint, and pastel."


Keltie Ferris is known for her mostly large-scale canvases covered with layers of spray paint and hand-painted geometric fields. Ferris's pixilated backgrounds and atmospheric foregrounds create perceptual depth that allows for multidimensional readings of her work. Characterized by a continuously expanding investigation into painting, her practice considers a multiplanar site for constructed light and shifting space. In her ongoing series of body prints, Ferris uses her own body like a brush, covering it with natural oils and pigments and pressing it against a canvas, to literalize the relationship of an artists' identity to the work that he or she produces.

Keltie Ferris was born in Kentucky in 1977 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include Body Prints and Paintings at the University Art Museum at SUNY Albany, New York (2016); Paintings and Body Prints at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2015); Keltie Ferris: Doomsday Boogie at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2014); Body Prints at Chapter NY, New York (2014); and Man Eaters at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City (2009-10). Her works have been included in group exhibitions at institutions, including Saatchi Gallery, London (2014); Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Texas (2014); The Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2014); Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012); the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis (2010); and The Kitchen, New York (2009). She was recently awarded the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting by the Academy of Arts and Letters.