Keltie Ferris (born 1977, Louisville, Kentucky) is an American abstract painter who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a BFA from the

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design NSCAD University, also known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design or NSCAD, is a public art university in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The university is a co-educational institution that offers bachelor's and master's degrees. The uni ...

and an MFA from the

Yale School of Art The Yale School of Art is the art school of Yale University. Founded in 1869 as the first professional fine arts school in the United States, it grants Masters of Fine Arts degrees to students completing a two-year course in graphic design, painti ...

(2006).

Style and technique

Ferris uses several main techniques in his work, including spray guns, chunky paint applied with palette knives, and has included the application of oil and pigments to the canvas using his own body. His paintings are casualist, reference such disparate sources as pointillism, pixelation, and graffiti, and invite the viewer to question what it is they are seeing and to put the images together for themselves. According to Andrew Goldstein, writing for ''

Artnet Artnet.com is an art market website. It is operated by Artnet Worldwide Corporation, which has headquarters in New York City, in the United States, and is owned by Artnet AG, a German publicly traded company based in Berlin that is listed on t ...

'', "Ferris became famous for making abstract paintings from meltingly bright blurs of color that seemed both pixelated and powered by the force of their own vibrant chromatic electricity," before adopting the style of using his body, while "wearing a hardy denim outfit," to create paintings around 2014. By 2017, he had resumed using a traditional paintbrush. In 2021, Tausif Noor writes for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' about Ferris's exhibition “FEEEEELING”: "Rejecting a hard disciplinary line between drawing and painting, Ferris revels in that more exhilarating space that emerges between mediums, which allows instinct and intuition to take the lead. ..Ferris’s ingeniousness, however, is more of a self-critical expansion of his own techniques than a gaze back at the canon, making his style resolutely one of a kind."

Awards

2014 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Permanent collections

* The

Saatchi Gallery The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and an independent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the D ...

, London England * The

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. With a $5 million annual budget and approximately 75,000 visitors each year, it is Missouri's first and largest contemporary museum. Founders The core of the museum's perm ...

, Kansas City, MO * The

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art is an art museum that is part of Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. The Nerman Museum is named for donors Jerry and Margaret Nerman. It opened in October 2007, succeeding the college's ...

(Oppenheimer Collection), Overland Park, KS

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ferris, Keltie 1977 births Living people American abstract artists Casualist artists Artists from Louisville, Kentucky NSCAD University alumni Yale School of Art alumni Painters from Kentucky 21st-century American painters 20th-century American painters