Rosy Keyser

Mar 6

Rosy Keyser (b. 1974, Baltimore, MD) asks how we can propagate new beauty, new language, new structures, and new tools using the elastic language of painting. Keyser uses painting as a tactile and physical exercise like abstractionists before her, yet she pushes beyond the simply gestural. Keyser engages Umwelt - the phenomenon in which the experience of reality is shaped by the differences in sensory and perceptual systems between organisms—within her material and conceptual process.

Relationships between the artist’s surfaces are that of both friction and integration; materials are distorted and reconfigured in an interplay that embodies energy changing form. She paints, bends, casts, recasts, and conducts all in an effort to describe aspects of nature as she negotiates the shifting relationships of creation and destruction simultaneous to its attendant sensuality and brutality, challenging the physical and structural boundaries of her work. As Katy Crowe observed in Two Coats of Paint, “Keyser deftly balances calculation and chance with an eye to simulating and quietly celebrating natural phenomena.”

Keyser earned her BFA from Cornell University in 1997 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003.

Keyser has shown extensively throughout the United States and internationally. Museum exhibitions include Painter Painter at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and Pink Caviar at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Keyser’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK. Rosy Keyser was a Fall 2017 artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, TX) and a 2022 artist-in-residence at the Læsø AiR, Denmark.

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