The pairing of these two meticulous sculptors exposes us to a triumph of handwork by two masters in their overlapping mediums with different takes on form and surface.
Exploring social and obscure formal connections via his minimalist sculptures and drawings, Marc D'Estout's work often reveals a dark humor or uncanny associations, addressing lurking fears, personal (mis) communication, social nuance, or pop humor. D’Estout has a deep connection with materials and process, predominantly the challenging skills of hand-shaping sheet metal forms, which are then finished with carefully crafted surfaces. His style falls somewhere between the fine art metalsmith and those of artisans who hand-form custom car bodies. His life-long love of automobiles is integral to his visual language and his studio practice, although there is a world of difference in objective and approach in his work. The application of D’Estout’s vision through these highly disciplined craft-based processes is unique in the context of contemporary art.
Jay Kelly began his career as a photorealist painter who shifted his focus towards abstraction in the late 90's. Moving away from his remarkably rendered realist paintings, Kelly's practice evolved into a completely anti-representational body of work. With a deft execution of materials such as metal, wood, nickel, silver, gesso, Japanese paper and acrylic paint, Kelly creates a vast world of miniature abstract forms that confusingly and pleasingly read monumental in spite of the intimacy they demand. The sculptures play on the human psyche and will be presented in the gallery space as a community of biomorphic, organic and oddly referential constructions. Calling to mind the work of Martin Puryear, Paul Klee, Alexander Calder, and Tim Burton, the work's clean lines and minimal aesthetic also allude to 20th century modernist architecture and furniture.
Marc D’Estout is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, art director and designer. He is currently represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco. In addition, his work has been exhibited at numerous venues including: Aqua Miami, University of Hawai’i Art Gallery in Honolulu, Hawaii; Red Gallery at Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Houston, TX; SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Tercera Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA; Bedford Gallery/Dean Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA; San Jose ICA, San Jose, CA; and the Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, CA – as well as furniture and design galleries such and LIMN and Coup d’Etat in San Francisco and Gallery of Functional Art in Santa Monica, LA. D'Estout holds an MFA degree from San Jose State University.
The work of Jay Kelly is in collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The British Museum, London, England; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. His work has been exhibited extensively in venues such as Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, CA; Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago, IL; Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York, NY; The Contemporary Museum Honolulu in Honolulu, HI, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, Spain. Kelly earned his BA from Syracuse University.
