Leslie Kerr in the Sixties at the Landing
Kerr built bright, sharp-edged paintings that reference the illustration art and advertising popular during his youth as a way to, in the words of curator Laura Whitcomb, “suggest that modern iconography had replaced systems of religiosity.” Kerr employed a remarkable precision in creating paintings that feature forms that are sometimes perfectly recognizable—like tongues, starbursts and sunbursts, rainbows, fountains, and clean circles—and other times morph into tubes and bulbous shapes that, while rendered with precise clarity, remain unrecognizable and mysterious, though they seem to reference the body. The mix of tones in Kerr’s paintings—sometimes clear and referential, sometimes shrouded—has built a body of work sometimes described as Pop Art, and other times as Surrealism. Always apparent in Kerr’s work is a technical precision; his superior abilities as a draftsman inspired ArtForum to call Kerr, in 1962, “one of the most able painters in California.”
Read more about Kerr at Hyperallergic
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
In addition to all the California art, is the furniture. Seen here are California production chairs by Paul Tuttle.
Gerard talking about Kerr's painting technique, with a California-made Stewart MacDougall chair on the right.
Kerr ephemera