Kelly’s Tales
A Solo Show Feat. Kelly Detweiler: May 3-29, 2010
Presented by Sandra Lee Gallery
Union Sq., San Francisco, CA – April 1, 2010 – Sandra Lee Gallery proudly announces the upcoming solo exhibition of Kelly Detweiler, Kelly’s Tales, on display May 3-29, 2010. In honor of this new exhibition, the gallery is hosting an artist’s reception on Thursday, May 6, 5:30-7:30pm, open and welcome to the public.
Detweiler’s whimsical works draw from his own personal fantasies and the imaginary relics of his childhood, creating surrealist arrangements of reconstituted scraps taken from various parts of the artist’s psyche. His colorful and fanciful paintings are a tribute to his light-hearted and joyous approach to the practice of art-making, while his collages, assembled from fragments of images collected over a lifetime, emphasize the ever-present temporality of the artist’s process.
Detweiler, Professor of Painting, Drawing and Mixed Media at Santa Clara University, also holds the Chair of the Art and Art History Department, an academic position that no doubt provides a constant reminder of modern art’s long and varied lineage. Thus Detweiler playfully references techniques from canonical art history that are ultimately mediated by the whimsy and gentle humor of his artist’s sensibility. Idyllic natural scenes clearly allude to traditional landscape painting, while his series of skewed faces bring up immediate associations with Cubist portraitures that are splashed with Fauvist color. His deliberately naïve painting style is a nod to the childlike essence that is, for him, the central inspiration of artistic creation.
Detweiler’s works do not easily suggest narrative action, leaving much of this reconstructive work to the viewer and, in effect, asking the viewer to reenact the artist’s own process of imaginative creation. The artist invites us all to help him tell his tales in Kelly’s Tales.
Sandra Lee Gallery will be exhibiting a range of Detweiler’s paintings and collages that showcase the artist’s unique, distinctive style and humorous approach to art and life. The exhibition will be on view May 3-29, 2010 at Sandra Lee Gallery, located at 251 Post St. Ste. 310, San Francisco, CA 94108, one block away from Union Square.