Each of the 12 large-scale paintings in Keltie Ferris’s exhibition “FEEEEELING” is set within a handmade frame, and all of them were made in the past year. Considered together, the paintings act as an inventory of the innovative techniques the artist has used over the past decade. A series of looping monochrome compositions made with graphite give way to compact geometric assemblages, which are interspersed with multilayered paintings made by imprinting canvas onto canvas. This is Ferris’s trip down memory lane, but the works still feel fresh.

This article appeared in the April 26, 2021, issue of New York Magazine.

In the fall of 2015, myself and my then-partner were bobbing through Chelsea for the perfunctory NYC gallery hop. Driven by that pretentious, guileless swagger of recent art school graduates, we were anxious to consume. Consume what? It’s difficult to explain that insatiable hunger. A hunger for that glimmer of a swoon, that seraphic electricity that certain artworks can inspire—in other words, that bombastic and elusive sense of meaning. My partner, an abstract painter herself and a devout planner, had prepared a hefty itinerary beginning with Ferris’ show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

As is true of many good painters, there’s one thing for sure that can be said about her work: it’s damn good painting! But we still find ourselves on the most bizarre terrain. For example, the controversial appointment of Brett Kavanaugh as Supreme Court Justice. Or the question that poses itself for big city dwellers who are no longer so young, but not yet old: whether that was enough city life, whether it might not be better to move to the country. Or the peculiarities of the German language.

This exhibition of paintings and drawings marks a bold and confident change in the working methods of Keltie Ferris. A significant departure has been made from the characteristically fuzzy and pixelated images taken and transformed from screens present in previous paintings. In their stead is an assertive—and risky—incursion of influence from high profile painters—George Condo, Christopher Wool, and Jonathan Lasker—but especially Wool, of whom Ferris has said, “I feel like Christopher Wool is so influential, he’s almost like our de Kooning right now. Everyone is copying him, or riffing on what he has brought to the table.”

The artist’s subjectivity is literally inseparable from the work in Keltie Ferris’s latest exhibition of body prints, “M\A\R\C\H.” She made the twenty-eight prints in the show by dousing her body, usually clothed but sometimes nude, in oil and pressing it against paper, then covering it with pigment. While the layered pigment renders every crease and crevice of clothing and flesh, the colors also work to create vibrating relationships that define the mood of the figure they make. On one wall, fourteen prints hang in a grid, each one radiating an individual palette, often mirrored by playful titles.

Unlike her predecessors, Ferris’ body prints reject an easy gendered identification of the body, suggesting a fluid and performative state of gender identity. As no two prints are exactly the same, each work represents a multitude of forms, which when displayed together, present individual facets of the artist’s identity, both autonomous and dependent. 

Keltie Ferris's current show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, "M\A\R\C\H," furthers the Brooklyn-based artist's experiments in exploring queer identity with recent selections from her ongoing series of body prints. Covering herself in oil and pressing her frame onto paper that she paints in beaming hues, Ferris triumphs over the surface and the very patriarchal ideology of her medium. The denim pants and shirts she dons in each print lend a distinct shape, challenging typical likenesses of the female nude. 

On the ocassion of her first East Coast museum solo, Brooklyn-based Keltie Ferris discusses her quest to produce "autonomous" body prints and abstract paintings-- exuberantly colorful works deteremined by their own formal dynamics rather than theory, market trends or aesthetic fashion.

Until recently, the best way to prove you were a serious painter was to paint unseriously: mocking the medium, the way Polke or Kippenberger did, proved that you knew the rules of the game. That moment has passed. This bravura show by a leading figure of the new-new painting finds Ferris deploying an arsenal of techniques, from spray guns to impressions of her own body, in riotous soft-edged compositions. She eschews Ab-Ex mark-making for nongestural layers of color, airy mauve or honking goldenrod, interrupted at times by flowing circuits broken into patterns suggestive of pixels. This is the work of an artist who isn’t afraid to tell painting “I love you.” Through Oct. 17.

About eight years ago Keltie Ferris burst onto the New York painting scene like a bat out of hell, that is, if you define hell as the Yale M.F.A. painting program; back then, her large Day-Glo-colored canvases were perfect crosses between hazy 1970s Color Field painting, pixilated digital space breaking up and reforming in odd-shaped plates, and painterly abstraction at the same time totally avoiding any derivative overlap with artists like Kelly Walker or Gerhard Richter.

Keltie Ferris continues to make some of the jazziest abstract paintings around.  Several are absolute knockouts, combining blurred passages of spray paint with massed rectangular patches that suggest blown-up pixels created with a computer paint program. 

 “There's a weird culture where works on paper aren't respected the same way as paintings are,” said Keltie Ferris, walking through her latest exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which pairs vibrant mixed-media canvases with more intimate body-prints. “This show is about whether these two bodies of work, which were feeling disparate, can hang together.

At Mitchell-Innes & Nash, meanwhile, Ferris continues to stake out her position as one of today’s finest abstract painter with ever larger, ever more exuberantly colored pieces, where shifting blurs compete with crisp, thick pointillist passages. Vibrating with punchy oranges, purples, and pinks, these paintings look like aerial views of futuristic cities, acid–inspired quilts, or glitch-laced JPEGs. Frankenthaler and Gilliam are forebears, but Ferris pushes, with great aplomb, beyond those influences, forging a style that feels bracingly, thrillingly fresh, and one in which space ambiguously slips and slides.

La Estrella, [P]y[X]i[S], oRiOn: We’re caught up in the jumbled syntax of the heavens in Keltie Ferris’s dazzling show of ten paintings and six body prints, all from 2015. The constellations that lend their name to some of these canvases trace distinct forms but are composed of flickering stars whose boundaries are less clear to us down on Earth. And this is a central aspect of Ferris’s paintings, whose thin airbushed oil layers and dragged acrylic strokes build a rich color space (here, moving beyond the loose neon graffiti of her 2012–13 gallery show into deep purples, reds, ochers) that shifts in and out of focus. Are these shapes or are they impressions?

This has been a summer of women warriors: Serena Williams, Angela Merkel, Charlize Theron’s character in “Max Max: Fury Road,” and Shaye Haver and Kristen Griest, the first women to earn the United States Army’s elite Ranger designation. Now, in the final days of summer, painting’s warrior women are advancing, and Keltie Ferris is among them.

Brooklyn-based painter Keltie Ferris creates marks—smeared, sprayed and hand-painted—that solidify or dissolve into abstractions with a sense of perceptual depth that allows for multi-dimensional readings. The 38-year-old artist returns to Chelsea gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash for her second solo exhibition (Sept. 10-Oct. 17) with several new works created during her recent trip to Los Angeles.

This fall, Ferris’s paintings and body prints will be shown together for the first time in her second solo at Mitchell-Innes and Nash in Chelsea. As she prepared for that exhibition (opening September 10) and two other upcoming shows at the University Art Museum in Albany and Klemm’s in Berlin, Ferris welcomed Artspace's Karen Rosenberg to her Bushwick studio to talk about her embrace of body art and what it means for her paintings.

Keltie Ferris is known for large paintings that lap, layer upon layer, into glimmering pictorial spaces; like her, they are utterly debonair. Last month she debuted Body Prints at Chapter NY, surprising new works which, as the title suggests, are impressions of her body on paper. Ferris’s paintings can also be seen in the 2014 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters (March 6 – April 12) where she received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in painting. She met with Jarrett Earnest in her studio to discuss bodies, abstraction, and color-feelings over beer and mint tea, respectively.

The most noticeable, and therefore notable, features of Keltie Ferris’s well-lavished paintings are their two most immediate strata: Ferris finishes off her large-scale abstractions with arrays of spray-painted dots and dashes and then returns with a brush loaded with a higher-intensity, contrasting color to lay down short, chunky strokes tightly packed in vertical, parallel arrangements around the previous layer.

At some point while I was walking around the spacious exhibition space of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, it struck me that Keltie Ferris’s paintings no longer seemed to be making obvious allusions to Joan Mitchell, Frank Stella, and Piet Mondrian. This may have been due to the order in which I looked at the paintings, but as I went from one to the next I could sense her increasing confidence.

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’s big, scintillating paintings recall a time a half-century ago when the introduction of a new style in abstract painting could be regarded as an event of seismic significance.

"Sometimes I think of my paintings as people," says the Brooklyn-based artist Keltie Ferris, whose solo show runs Nov. 29–Jan. 12 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York.

"Sometimes I think of my paintings as people," says the Brooklyn-based artist Keltie Ferris, whose solo show runs Nov. 29–Jan. 12 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York.

Keltie Ferris paints with her own kind of well-informed vengeance, and it gives her abstractions a taut, slightly hard-bitten decorative verve. 

He-She, 2010, by 32-year-old Louisville-born, Brooklyn-based artist Keltie Ferris dominates the stand of Horton Gallery (Sunday L.E.S.) (P94/750/850).  

Keltie Ferris--a 2006 Yale MFA who participated in the height-of-the-market, art-department-raiding exhibition "School Days" at Jack Tilton Gallery in 2006--has a lot of good ideas, even if they're not all fully developed yet. 

Armed with a palette knife and a spray gun, Keltie Ferris grapples with the idiom of gestrual abstraction in her first New York solo show, "Dear Sir or Madam."