| Ward Shelley is an artist’s artist. His pieces make you stop and consider every work you have ever seen, everything you have ever read about art. Shelley’s work is intense and challenges, almost dares, the viewer to question content, intent. In 2004, he literally holed up in Pierogi gallery, climbing throughout the gallery walls, living in his exhibition, aptly titled, We Have Mice. In his “Rematerializing Art,” we see artists’ influences painted, diagramed in fact. Essentially this collection of paintings is the beginning a comprehensive guide to art history, but in another way, it’s nothing more than personal. Little blips of what makes Ward Shelley tick. | 
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Marisa Ripo on Ward Shelley
Ward Shelley, Carolee Schneemann Chart, version 2, 2006; oil color and toner on polyester.
Ward Shelley is an artist’s artist. His pieces make you stop and consider every work you have ever seen, everything you have ever read about art. Shelley’s work is intense and challenges, almost dares, the viewer to question content, intent. In 2004, he literally holed up in Pierogi gallery, climbing throughout the gallery walls, living in his exhibition, aptly titled, We Have Mice.
In his “Rematerializing Art,” we see artists’ influences painted, diagramed in fact. Essentially this collection of paintings is the beginning a comprehensive guide to art history, but in another way, it’s nothing more than personal. Little blips of what makes Ward Shelley tick. The artists and movements that inspire him, plainly displayed. Shelley recognizes and pays homage to artists, genres, and influencers of personal significance who have fallen through the very wide cracks in art history.
In one of the most comprehensive paintings in the collection, Who Invented the Avant-Garde, ver.2, Shelley deconstructs the history of the genre. The painting, traditional in its use of oils, depicts interlocking arteries, valves, and organs. A throbbing, pulsing, living thing spewing the history of the avant-garde across an almost maniacally tedious grid that encompasses the entire canvas. Futurism. Armory Show. Duchamp. Shelley scatters these words with countless others in varied sizes and with strategic placement, denoting importance at his own discretion. The brain eats up Shelley’s fast-food history lesson; all the facts of an art history degree in a fraction of the time.
“Rematerializing Art” has a cohesive feel, thanks to Shelley’s adherence to a strict template for each work. His mix of rigid line against organic shape stays constant in each work, with just color and subject matter differing between them.
Shelley perfected this method in his more focused paintings that feature a single subject, like his in-depth portraits of artists such as Carolee Schneeman and Chris Burden, and the refreshing nod to Alfred Barr. He reduces—in the sense of particularizing, not minimizing—their careers and activities to a single canvas, personalizing the objective and filtering their history through his own.
