Jack Reilly (artist)
Jack Reilly (born 1950) is an American (Los Angeles) artist known for his complex shaped canvas paintings. His work is widely exhibited and included in public and private collections internationally. Work. Reilly's early abstract paintings reflected various influences of prominent artists of the time including Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Ronald Davis, Jules Olitski, and Trevor Bell. Each of these abstract painters dealt with structure, color, atmosphere, light and ambiguous space; elements that would eventually converge in Reilly's abstract paintings. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1978, Reilly's geometric abstraction emerged, extracting and redefining  elements prevalent in contemporary abstract painting. His work commented on numerous formal and pictorial issues of the era, and by combining illusionary space with color field painting, Reilly created a synthesis of geometric abstraction and pictorial depth, which is also referred to as Abstract Illusionism. In 1979 Reilly's work was exhibited in his first solo show in Los Angeles at the Molly Barnes Gallery. That same year, curator Donald Brewer included Reilly's painting in a major museum exhibition entitled "The Reality of Illusion," an international survey of painting and sculpture that explored "trompe-l'œil" in both abstract and  representational art. The exhibition opened at the Denver Art Museum and traveled throughout the United States for two years. By 1980, Reilly's paintings were represented by galleries in major American cities including the Molly Barnes Gallery in Los Angeles, Aaron Berman Gallery in New York, Foster Goldstrom Fine Arts in San Francisco and Marilyn Butler Gallery in Scottsdale. Articles and reviews on Reilly's shaped canvas paintings were subsequently published in Arts Magazine, Art Week, and the Los Angeles Times, and in books including "Inside the L.A. Artist" (1988) by Marva Morrow, "American Art Now" (1985) by Edward Lucie -Smith, and "Introduction to Design" (1983) by Robin Landa.