Leslie Kerr / In the Sixties
Leslie Kerr in the Sixties at the Landing Leslie Kerr was a prominent figure in the California avant-garde art scene of the 50s and 60s; he had a solo show at Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery in 1958, then moved up to San Francisco, where, between 1960 and 1966, he had five solo shows at the Dilexi Gallery; in 1962, he was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s seminal exhibition Fifty California Artists. In 1964, Kerr moved to New York, where he had solo shows at Odyssia Gallery and Bianchini Gallery, was in a group show at Green Gallery, and was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s annual exhibition of 1967. 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 recogn...