October 15 - 30, 2022
A life-long artist, Gay’s catalog of consists of more than a thousand paintings, drawings, prints, and three-dimensional pieces, split roughly 50/50 between representational and abstract styles. In the 1980s her figurative work was moderately well known in Texas artistic circles through museum and gallery shows. Many works in those shows were big, bravura canvases in her immediately recognizable expressionistic style. For the show, we have selected over 40 pieces that display Gay’s amazing breadth of talent.
This event will also serve as the launch for the book, “Gay Fay: The Brooklyn Fuji Sketchbooks,” written and compiled by Gay Fay Kelly’s husband, Dan Kelly, and designed by Austin artist Scott Rolfe. It includes drawings and collages from the sketchbooks that Gay contributed to the Brooklyn Art Library between 2012 and 2021. Gay considered her Fuji series the locus of her abstract style. The pieces in the book are intimate and reflective, chamber-music complements to her big orchestral canvases.
About the artist: Gay Fay was a seventh-generation Texan, born in Baytown in 1949. She had a tough, scientific mind. In 1969 she was thriving as a third-year geochemistry major at Rice University when John and Dominique de Menil handed the school a fully formed art department and brought in an epoch-making exhibition from MoMA, The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age. The show changed Gay’s life. She switched to art and art history, graduated with honors in 1972, and was a working artist the rest of her life.”
Reception: October 15, 2022 | 4–9 pm
2023 E Cesar Chavez St.
Austin, 78702 Texas
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