- Source: The New Yorker
- Author: Editorial Staff
- Date: April 2017
- Format: PRINT
Keltie Ferris
The Brooklyn artist writes a new chapter in the history of painting as performance
© Keltie Ferris. Photograph by Mark Woods. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash
The Brooklyn artist writes a new chapter in the history of painting as performance—a powerful update of Yves Klein’s infamous use of naked women as blue-dipped brushes. Ferris’s imprints on paper of her own painted form, clad in a button-down shirt and belted jeans, have a cowboyish gender fluidity. The results can evoke Warhol’s iconic Elvis series, especially when Ferris’s hands rest at her hips, as if poised at a holster. In the turquoise-and-crimson “Joan/Joni,” we see a sturdy stance and a blurred head; in “twinKtwin,” the figure is headless and symmetrical, a vision in yellow and silver. The novel self-portraits may surprise viewers who know only the artist’s rambunctious abstractions—they will doubtless earn her some new fans as well.
