Kellyann Burns: Processing

About

“Every painting is a fundamental act – art is an extension of my life. I strive to make each painting unique, nuanced and full of contradictions with the goal of creating an experience that is familiar and unexpected, visceral and yet lucid to each viewer. Everyone’s perception and relationship to colors, forms and surfaces are uniquely personal - this is the beauty of life. I work in the abstract because it encourages ambiguity, my paintings embrace the individuality of perception – there is no right or wrong way of contemplation, no up or down, no left to right, no right to left. This uncertainty provides the opportunity to construct a personal intimate relationship with the work, informed by the viewer’s engagement and experience. Processing my paintings is a reflective and subjective act.”

- Kellyann Burns

Los Angeles, CA. Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Kellyann Burns: Processing. While dedicated to abstraction, Burns intentionally evades attempts at having her paintings classified in any specific mode. She embraces an unending evolution in her painting practice, while simultaneously staying deeply committed to her working process.

Burns’ interest in abstracting the world she observes is central to her artistic methodologies. Her multilayered paintings on aluminum dibond plates are selectively sanded to reveal complex strata of rich colors and surface textures. Burns continually turns her paintings, actively working them in all four of the rotated positions. She doesn’t consider a work complete until she is satisfied with the composition in all four directions, meaning that it can be displayed in any orientation.

The artist’s process is both calculated and paradoxically intuitive. Looking through one stratum to another has become a consistent visual theme in her work, alluding very deliberately to the passage of time. Ultimately, she believes her work is a form of excavation and comes from the instinct to search. Much of what drives her practice is an exploration of ways to exceed the limits set by opposing constructs, such as the structured and the chaotic; the conceptual and the subconscious; the natural and the built world. Burns aims to resolve the conflicts inherent in these oppositions by creating a balance in their divisions. 

Burns works intuitively, often not recognizing the source of her inspiration until days, months, or years later, which suits the artist’s clear objective for her paintings – not to impose a preconceived idea of what the painting is. For this reason, she titles her paintings with the time and date she decides they are finished, creating a form of documentation and not a title of declaration.

Works by Kellyann Burns are included in numerous corporate and public collections. She is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant recipient and has received fellowships from many institutions including Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and Ucross. Burns has lectured to students from The Rhode Island School of Design, Cornell and CUNY and has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin and Dankook University in Seoul, Korea. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artnews, and Hyperallergic, among others.