Jack Reilly - Current Paintings

The circle holds strong significance as a fundamental geometric shape and has played a crucial role in astronomy, mathematics, physics, and religious traditions. Jack Reilly's circular paintings depict light, color, and illusive pictorial space, on circular shaped canvas structures. The evolution of Reilly's paintings developed over years of working in a shaped-canvas format. The essence of light, color and space emanates from these paintings that comment on the evolution of modern and contemporary abstract painting from abstract expressionism to post-painterly abstraction and color field. References to the abstract patterns of Jackson Pollock, the open spaces of Mark Rothko, the structure of  Frank Stella and the color fields of  Ellsworth Kelley and Jules Olitski place Reilly's paintings clearly in the continuum of American art history. Reilly's early career began in Los Angeles with a series of museum and gallery exhibitions that led to his recognition as an original artist of the Abstract Illusionism movement. Today he remains one of the foremost artists working in shaped canvas. His elegant visual systems, signature brushwork and meticulous technique incorporates acrylic polymers and metallic pigments, resulting in a visual effect that is often compared to the luminance of Gothic stained glass and the visual richness of Byzantine mosaics. The artwork displayed on this page represents Reilly's current work from the ongoing series.