March 6-9, 2014
“In this decade in which the global art market has become more a mongrel affair than a thoroughbred show, when nations and cultures like China, Iran, and fundamentalist Islam are shaking Western sensibilities to their core, Elisabeth Kley’s ability to revitalize ceramic art with an appearance of ancient and far cultural motifs and styles from around the globe is not only timely, it’s in tune with the reappraisal of tradition that is marking much of the art being made abroad and newly introduced to the West. Kley’s work by and large evokes the distance of time and geography without directly appropriating extant cultural designs. Her work is evocative of something we’ve seen somewhere in our travels or on museum visits–at times recalling Persian, Venetian, Florentine, Chinese, and Moroccan design and ornament–but truly articulates no one style or artifact we can name or point to. Similarly, Kley’s glaze paintings recall arabesques, organic vignettes, manuscript illuminations–though her most significant accomplishment is presenting us a richly variegated cross-culturalism that blurs history, lineage, global politics and identities for a generation of global, aesthete-nomads in pursuit of an eclectic and mutable, if resurrected, beauty.”
G. Roger Denson, Huffington Post
Elisabeth Kley is a New York artist and writer whose solo exhibitions of ceramics, watercolors, drawings and prints have taken place in the John Tevis Gallery in Paris, France, Georgian National Gallery in Tbilisi, Le Petit Versailles and Rose Burlingham in New York and Momenta Art in Brooklyn. Her group exhibitions include Haunch of Venison, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, Lesley Heller Workspace, Exit Art and Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery in New York, A. M. Richard Fine Art and Storefront in Brooklyn, Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach and SEASON in Seattle. She has been nominated for several grants, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, and she was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1998.
Elisabeth Kley, Large Green and Gold Round Lotus Bottle, 2012, glazed earthenware, 21 inches high.
Elisabeth Kley, Tangerine Lobed Bottle, 2012, glazed earthenware, 13 inches high.
Elisabeth Kley, Large Black and White Three Part Bottle Study with Fans, 2012, ink and graphite on paper, 46 x 35 inches.