Jack Reilly Studio
Visual Arts
Contact
Description
Jack Reilly is a contemporary American artist known for his paintings on shaped canvas structures, signature brushwork, and seductive illusionism. His work is widely collected and exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world. Reilly is recognized as an original member of the 1970s Abstract Illusionism movement, and one of the foremost artists working in shaped canvas today. Although he is primarily considered to be an abstract painter, his artistic facility and mixed-genre style depict an artist capable of eluding classification, working in both abstraction and representational painting. In addition to Reilly's long-standing career as an exhibiting painter, he is Professor Emeritus at California State University and currently teaches painting at Vero Beach Museum of Art. In 2022 he moved his primary residence and studio to Melbourne, Fl, and maintains gallery representation in Los Angeles, California.
Reilly's career began in Los Angeles in 1978, shortly after his paintings were discovered by prominent Los Angeles gallerist Molly Barns. Reilly had just received his MFA from Florida State University and promptly moved to Los Angeles. Following the critical success of his first solo Los Angeles exhibition, he was invited by Donald Brewer, curator of the Fisher Museum at the University of Southern California, to exhibit in The Reality of Illusion, a major exhibition which opened at the Denver Art Museum and subsequently traveled for two years to the Oakland Museum, USC Fisher Museum, Johnson Museum at Cornell, Honolulu Academy of Arts, among other prominent institutions nationwide. This series of museum exhibitions established Reilly as one of the original artists associated with the Abstract illusionism painting movement. In 1979 Reilly received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.
By the early 1980s, Reilly's paintings were exhibited in museums and represented by galleries in major American art centers including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Scottsdale Az, and numerous others. Articles and reviews on Reilly's paintings were subsequently published in Arts Magazine, Art Week, the Los Angeles Times, New York Artworld, and in books including American Art Now by noted author and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith, and Inside the L.A. Artist by Marva Marrow. Such notable collectors, including Fred and Marcia Weisman, Steve Martin, Daniel Melnick and numerous others, as well as public institutions, acquired Reilly’s paintings. The 1990s yielded major public art commissions including a forty-foot, site-specific, steel wall structure for the County of San Diego Public Art Program, soon followed by an eighteen-foot, shaped-canvas painting commission for American Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).
