Keltie Ferris

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Mitchell-Innes & Nash
534 W 26th Street
New York
Chelsea
Apr 16th 2021 — May 29th 2021

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Keltie Ferris’s fifth solo exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash debuts a suite of new paintings as well as his first wall drawing made specifically for the site. The dozen works on view have playful titles—one of which lends the exhibition its name — and are set in custom-made, often colorful frames.

The paintings in one series are layered in construction, high-octane in palette, and textured with oil paint and watercolor, which repel each other, offset with bold lines set in runic swirls. The bright blue lines of s=t=r=e=a=m=s (2020-21), for instance, raise bold red shapes in their intersections like irritated skin; others are so bright as to approximate an afterimage of bright light seen through close-lidded eyes.

Another series depicts overlapping geometric forms: Ferris’s take on water lilies, for instance, looks like an ordinary image fed through a distortive filter, pixelated and shimmering in lilac, blue and green. The final series in the show are tightly cropped and densely layered pencil compositions, in swirling arrangements. )))(((sounds)))((( (2020-1), for instance, echoes its title both in its overlapping and parallel strokes, and in its cacophony of marks.

Keltie Ferris, loving u rn, 2020-2021. Oil on canvas in the artist’s frame, canvas: 90 by 60 inches; framed: 93 by 63 inches.