In her fifty-year career, Tatana Kellner (born 1950) has developed a vast repertoire of techniques; monoprinting, painting, collage, and digital imaging. Her toolbox of materials is similarly replete: she employs acrylic paint, oilstick, pastel, charcoal, photocopied images and textures. She mixes these methods and means in a try-it-out practice, working with instinct and experimentation. For Kellner, a work’s legibility in terms of techniques used is not as important as its successful effect overall.  

Growing up in communist Czechoslovakia as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, she was taught to compy in public and “never trust” in private, producing a schizophrenic lens with which to see the world. Immigrating to the United States as a teenager, Kellner trained in printmaking, and later co-founded the acclaimed Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York in 1974—providing the base of her artistic practice.  

Drawing from the affect and conflicts of contemporary culture, Kellner’s works are expressive and confident. Her paintings and works on paper capture the humor, absurdity and fragility of humans; engaging emotion without sentimentality. Kellner’s work breathes confidence in contradiction: whether abstract or figurative, maximal or minimal, each of her works reflect an artist at the top of her powers.

Tatana Kellner is a two-time recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and is a past recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and the Puffin Foundation grant, among many other awards, grants and distinctions. She has been awarded residencies at such institutions as The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Banff Centre for the Arts. Kellner has been featured in over 20 solo exhibitions in the USA and Canada and is the author of over 22 limited-edition art books. She lives and works in Rosendale, New York.