Jack Reilly

Who is Jack Reilly?

Jack Reilly is an American artist known for his complex shaped canvas paintings. His work is widely exhibited and included in public and private collections internationally. Reilly's early abstract paintings reflected various influences of prominent artists of the time including Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Ronald Davis, Jules Olitski, and Trevor Bell. Each of these painters dealt with structure, color, atmosphere, light and ambiguous space; elements that would eventually converge in Reilly's abstract paintings. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1978, Reilly's geometric abstraction emerged, extracting and redefining elements prevalent in contemporary abstract painting. His work commented on numerous formal and pictorial issues of the era, and by combining illusionary space with color field painting, Reilly created a synthesis of geometric abstraction and pictorial depth, which is also referred to as Abstract Illusionism. In 1979 Reilly's work was exhibited in his first solo show in Los Angeles at the Molly Barnes Gallery. That same year, curator Donald Brewer included Reilly's painting in a major museum exhibition entitled "The Reality of Illusion," an international survey of painting and sculpture that explored "trompe l'oeil" in both abstract and representational art. The exhibition opened at the Denver Art Museum and traveled throughout the United States for two years.