JERRY OTT
Jerry Ott is a realist artist who began to paint from photographs while still in college in the middle to late 60s. While citing Pop Artists such as James Rosenquist, Larry Rivers, and Richard Lindner as strong influences, it wasn't until being introduced to the work of German artist Paul Wunderlich that Ott began to work on a body of figurative work painted directly from photographs. Throughout the 70s and 80s his work was shown in major exhibitions with a group of artists that were to become known as "Photorealists", while also being exhibited as a major figurative painter.
Jerry Ott wields his wicked air brush with astonishing flair, painting anything on
anything and vice versa. His latest technical development are paintings wrapped across
two and three dimensional surfaces. They range from drawings a few inches wide to
sculptural assemblages more than five feet tall and eight feet long.
Ott enjoys enormous international acclaim when his meticulously realistic paintings appear in the art capitals of Europe, Japan and as far a field as New Zealand. Among the prestigious Institutions that have acquired his works are New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center.
His recent paintings indicate that nubile woman and delicate flesh continue to fascinate Ott, but no more so than the effects of light and shade, optical illusions, and the art world's peculiar fetishes. In "Pipe Dreams," he juxtaposes a pretty but vapid looking girl with three banal lamps which refer to the mass-produced ceramic jars, vases and lamps sold as art. In Ott's painting, however, the reflections in the porcelain lamp bases and shadows that play across the skin are least as important as the woman herself.
Like much of Ott's earlier work, his new paintings are more about the nature of art and the experience of seeing than about the subjects they depict.
