Andrea Wohl Keefe

Andrea Wohl Keefe
Out Came the Sun 2 (detail), 2010
Ink and watercolor on paper
20" X 15"

Andrea Wohl Keefe’s paintings on canvas and paper are derived from observation of the abstract in her everyday life. Through a process of “trials and errors, selections and eliminations, happy accidents, and lucky discoveries,” she develops her images into compositions composed of opposites.

Wohl Keefe’s process-based work explores chance and the incidental in an effort to “become excited about redundancy, feel comfortable with uncertainty, and discover infinite possibilities within the mundane.”

Although rooted in the abstraction of the early 20th Century her work is not an attempt at utopian landscape, a Surrealist’s dream or a political statement. Nor is it an attempt to idealize her experience in socialist or Constructivist dogma. Wohl Keefe evolves a personal vocabulary of shapes, lines and colors that have their origin in both Romantic notions of the superiority of intuition, imagination and feeling in response to the artist’s world and in the Post-Impressionist attempt to create an abstracted world free from all that plagued it. To that end her vocabulary often includes stacks or piles of shapes and colors or odd floating “mountains.” The sometimes awkward space that evolves out of her process functions as a metaphor for her experience of everyday situations and relationships. Are these accumulations the burdens of life or are they encapsulations of frustrations piled high as an escape route? Her work is not without whimsy. Clouds, rainbows and flower-like shapes appear and reappear in bright colors. Circles within circles become eyes or are they eggs? Is someone watching or are they a promise for the future? Regardless of what form or composition results Wohl Keefe is seeking a meditation on the uniqueness of individual perception and the beauty in the everyday.

Andrea Wohl Keefe received a BFA from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and an MFA from Miami University (OH). She lives and maintains her studio in Philadelphia, PA.