Tana Kellner, "After the Hunt"

Artist Statement

I’m interested in the gap between abstraction and representation, the non-specificity and the compression of feelings combined with the adventure the material lends itself to. My process is organic and intuitive, beginning with a mark, a large abstract shape, or a photograph to create an optical and emotional experience. From these tentative beginnings, a new space emerges, suggesting perhaps figurative or associative element that I respond to. This is not something non-literal, it’s a feeling, often a fleeting one, a sense of things under the surface, that something is there, lurking just around the corner. It is this ambiguity that intrigues me. I’m interested what happens between the hand and the surface, how the materials and mark making disrupt the surface, how they evolve into a new whole.

Artist Bio

Tatana Kellner has been exhibited in numerous venues across USA, Canada and Europe, and she has had over 50 solo exhibitions. Her work has been selected for inclusion in Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, the Everson Museum, University of Albany Museum, Dorsky Museum, Kentler International Drawing Space, among many others. Kellner is the recipient of grants and awards, including the Pollock Krasner Foundation The Creative Climate Award the Puffin Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, among others. She is a co-founder of the Women’s Studio Workshop, an artists’ workspace in Rosendale, NY.

Kellner has been awarded residencies at The MacDowell, Yaddo, Banff Centre for the Arts, Light Work, Visual Studies Workshop, Saltonstall Art Colony, I-Park, Millay, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Foundacion Valparaiso, Bogliasco Foundation, Ucross, Haystack and Ragdale Foundation. She was born in the Czech Republic and works in Kingston, NY.

After the Hunt, collage, 11.5” x 17”, 2018, $300