Spring Collection: James Farrelly

James Farrelly is an American painter who lives and works in Brooklyn. His artistic vision, however, was formed by his upbringing and long residence in Rome. A sun-flooded, laconic Mediterranean sensibility pervades his art. The boldness of Farrelly's colour choices and the daring simplification of his forms, recall the mythic directness of Etruscan wall-painting quite as much as the later experiments of Bonnard and Matisse. 

In his new [2013] exhibition, his first in London for ten years, Farrelly explores the possibilities of collage. Using torn pieces of painted paper he assembles images - relatively small-scale landscapes and flower pieces - that combine an extraordinary sense of both the lightness and the power of natural world. 

John Goodrich, reviewing Farrelly's work in the New York Sun, wrote: 'Contours and colors fizz appealingly in these canvases; they have a kind of mute brilliance, thanks to a generality of description that simplifies gestures and reduces faces and hands to plots of color.'

Farrelly studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino, Yale University, and the New York Studio School. He was the recipient of a fellowship at the Maryland Art Institute landscape program. He has exhibited in London, New York, Rome and Verona.