Artist statement:
Ed Kerns is an American painter and educator. Kerns studied with and worked for Grace Hartigan, a highly regarded New York School Abstract-Expressionist and, through her came to know many artists from that generation including Willem de Kooning, James Brooks, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Kerns’ career had meteoric start. In 1972 his first New York exhibit opened with high critical praise for the young artist from the New York Times’ art critic John Russell who described Kerns’ work “as the best of a new generation of the New York School”. Additionally, his work as been reviewed in the Village Voice, Arts Magazine, Artforum, Art News, Artist Magazine, SCiARTin America and numerous other publications.
Kerns’ has enjoyed a long association with the New York galleries of Rosa Esman, Florence Lynch, Howard Scott and Tibor De Nagy. His career has spanned a prolific forty-five years. His paintings have been shown in over thirty-eight solo and one hundred thirty group exhibitions including galleries in New York, Washington, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Osaka, Dusseldorf and Mexico City as well as many other national and regional venues.
Regarding the auction item:
Kerns’ work, Martian Sex, most recently shown at the Seraphin Gallery in Philadelphia, is one of a series of paintings exploring how stochastic processes emerge into more complex structures. Kerns believes both art and science need each other as a powerful, collaborative approach to building models of human experience.