Kellyann Burns Exhibition

McKenzie Fine Art

[Image: Kellyann Burns "4:50 PM 3/10/17" (2017) oil on alu-dibond, 30 x 24 in.]

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McKenzie Fine Art presents an exhibition of new paintings by Kellyann Burns, her second solo show with the gallery.

Kellyann Burns has long examined the relationship between physical space, architecture, and the intimacy of perceptual experience in her work. She creates richly-colored oil paintings by applying even layers of pigment, one atop another, in solid fields of color and in shapes that reference architecture and the built world. After the layers have dried, they are each sanded, partially exposing shapes and colors beneath and creating a variety of matte and glossy textures through the interplay of translucency and opacity in the polished material. The erosions created through her sanding process also serve to soften the hard-edged geometries of the compositions. Through this working process of build-up and excavation, Burns is essentially working three-dimensionally on a two-dimensional plane; the evidence of the accumulation of layers can be seen at the irregular edges of her alu-dibond panels. She rotates paintings continuously while working, and considers them complete only when successfully realized in all four orientations.

Burns notes that she is “drawn to the beauty of erosion, how attrition and regeneration in the natural and built world evoke both the reductive and the expressive.” The passage of time is an essential theme in her work and relates to more than just the specific mechanical process of layering and excavation. It also alludes to the notion that the present is built upon layers of the past, and that man-made environments inevitably deteriorate as part of the relentless natural cycle of growth and decay. The artist’s intention is to elicit a personal and subjective recollection from each viewer as they look through one stratum to another in her sumptuous paintings.

Burns has been exhibiting her work nationally since the mid-1990s as well as in London and Seoul. Her work has been included in museum exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington, the North Dakota Museum of Fine Art in Grand Forks, and most recently, a solo exhibition of works on paper at the Joel Salter Gallery of the University of Wisconsin, Rice Lake.
Burns’ work has been reviewed in such publications as The New York Times, Artnews, and Hyperallergic, among others. After over twenty years living and working in Brooklyn, she moved to Los Angeles in 2015.