Biography
Ken Weathersby (b. 1963 Gulfport, Mississippi; lives Montclair, New Jersey) has exhibited his work nationally and internationally for the past two decades. He has recently mounted solo exhibitions at Pierogi Gallery (New York), One River Gallery (Englewood, NJ), NIAD Art Center Gallery (Richmond, CA), Some Walls (Oakland, CA), and John Cotton Dana Gallery at Rutgers University (Newark).

His work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Academy of Art Museum (New York), Honey Ramka (Brooklyn), Odetta Gallery (Brooklyn), 57w57Arts (New York), Parallel Art Space (Ridgewood, NY), Mixed Greens (New York), Aljira Art Center (Newark), the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Gallery (Morristown, NJ), Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Visual Art Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), Seven (Miami), Toomey Tourell (San Francisco), and IS Projects (Leiden, Netherlands), among many others.

Weathersby has received numerous awards and residencies, most recently the Individual Artist Painting Fellowship by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Council/NJSCA (2016). His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, Brooklyn Magazine, the New American Paintings blog, Painter’s Bread, and elsewhere.

Weathersby holds an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS.

Overview
Ken Weathersby makes abstract paintings that play with and against the conventions of both painting and abstraction. His new paintings combine graphic geometric patterns with representational, printed images of art works cut out of discarded art history books. The images Weathersby employs often depict a sculpture of a single human or animal figure and stem primarily from the periods of ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe.

Specific images are carefully selected and cropped, commonly leaving slivers of text from the originating books still visible. Weathersby then insets the images into recessed rectangular windows, which he cuts and constructs into the paintings’ surfaces. The position of the images within the paintings is carefully considered; images are either immersed into or juxtaposed against finely detailed patterns of repeating squares, circles, and triangles that are both painted in muted colors and drawn in pencil. The specific patterns Weathersby employs loosely reflect the character of the images themselves. Images fall both in and out of alignment with the patterns creating a heightened sense of solitude and timelessness.

About his new paintings, Weathersby states, “The collaged figures are both within the painting and outside of the presumed abstract visual event. They gesture and look, their directional gaze enacting something like a cinematic eye-line match. At other times they form morphological links with the abstract, painted elements while introducing things foreign to it: sculpture, photography, printing, and an earlier time.”

Gallery Exhibitions
Twenty, June 24 - September 30, 2023

Ken Weathersby: Dream Paintings, November 14, 2020 - January 30, 2021

Untitled (Summer), July 19 - August 24, 2019

Ken Weathersby: Time After Time, January 7 – February 25, 2017

Interviews + Videos
Nihilism and the Unconscious: Ken Weathersby at Minus Space, by Sharon Butler, Two Coats of Paint, January 23, 2021

Ken Weathersby Online Artist Talk, MINUS SPACE, December 4, 2020

Cabin Fever Artist Talk: Ken Weathersby, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2020

Ken Weathersby visits The Artist Recreates the World, Episode 280, by Gary Campbell, 2017

Linda Francis, John O'Connor, Ken Weathersby Panel Discussion, Honey Ramka, 2014

Linda Francis, John O'Connor and Ken Weathersby at SUITE 217, James Kalm Rough Cuts, 2013

Artist Talks: Ken Weathersby, Gallery Aferro, 2011