Robert Kelly is a contemporary American artist, best known for his collaged geometric abstractions. Conflating ideas of art and world history, systems theories, and Post-Minimalist abstraction, he works within the formal languages of painting and printmaking. Kelly’s work investigates the idea of doubleness through images that reflect, oppose, or imitate each other, and is influenced by the De Stijl movement, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Modernists like Kurt Schwitters. Born in 1956 in Santa Fe, NM, Kelly received his BA in 1978 from Harvard University in Cambridge. His practice is informed through extensive world travel, where he collects source material for his paintings, collaging and printing them into his works in his New York studio.
Kelly's work can be found among the collections of institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in Rutger’s University in New Brunswick, among others.