James Kelly at Katharina Rich Perlow

Though he lived in New York for 45 years, the late James Kelly (1913-2003) was little known in art circles in the city, having shown mainly on the West Coast. Among the generation of painters who went to the Bay Area to study on the G.I. Bill after World War II (he was born and raised in Philadelphia), Kelly is one of many regional Abstract Expressionists who have been neglected in the focus on what is really just a handful of New York School painters. This was his first New York solo; Perlow is now handling the estate.

The show surveyed Kelly's career from 1956 to a year before his death, with the exception of the 1970s, when the artist was painting in an uncharacteristically geometric manner that was deemed to jar with the rest of the works in the show. Otherwise, from the earliest to the latest, his paintings are loosely rendered and liberally composed, with heavy impasto and unfaltering energy and movement. From 1960 on, he worked in an extremely bright palette, often contrasting areas of flat, thickly brushed color with more staccato, broken passages relying heavily on the palette knife. By the 1980s, references to the real world became more recognizable, though hints of landscape were present much earlier.

An untitled vertical canvas from 1956 shows the artist composing allover in thick daubs of mixed color applied to a barely visible, more thinly brushed ground of similar marks. This and a small nocturnally toned canvas of the same year (Embarcadero Three), with S-curved bands scraped across the surface in various directions, were the most abstract in the show, evidently among the few from that interesting era that remain in the artist's estate. After moving to New York in 1958 with his wife, the artist Sonia Gechtoff, Kelly began his use of almost blinding hues, with works like Taxi (1962) evoking, perhaps, the sights from a moving vehicle, including a rough green rectangle and a black one that seem to stride across the top of the hot-hued canvas. From the same year, an equally large (77-by-66-inch) untitled painting contrasts smaller patches of color at the top with wider curves and swaths at the center, as if the top is further away; that device, along with the presence of a pink branching form evoking a tree and substantial areas of a high-keyed green, seems to suggest a landscape, though one clearly of the imagination.

The figurative expressionism so dominant in the 1980s must have exerted an influence on Kelly; present in the show were a number of abstracted still lifes demonstrating a humor that one associates with artists like Elizabeth Murray--an onion, for example, that seems to chase off a thick bluish stripe with a yellow X in the middle (Red Onion, 1986), or Vincent's Shoe (1987), Kelly's homage to van Gogh, with the simultaneous representation of the sole and the side of a homely boot. These rollicking compositions (in oil) are enclosed within neat wide borders of literally striated acrylic and the personally handcrafted frames with which Kelly designated a finished work. In Still Life with Mushrooms (1987), the objects--a loaf of bread and luminous white mushroom caps, among the more recognizable images--are accompanied by short diagonals, like the cuts of a chopping knife, and rosy, curving emanations, perhaps an allusion to the aroma of cooking food. This and a number of other works remind one of Wassily Kandinsky, in their use of color and form to evoke senses other than sight alone.

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