Jerry Kearns: Deep Cover the Deadly Art of Illusion 

This is the first contemporary comprehensive exhibition of Jerry’s Kearn’s work in this country or aboard. These dramatic, colorful paintings juxtapose the documentary “truth” of newspaper imagery against  the animated psychology of the comic cartoon. This format creates a mediated image that balances between the socially created fantasy (comics) and the socially created reality (news photos). 

Organized by the Tyler Galleries, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, the exhibition consists of paintings and lithographs from 1983-92 Kearns describes these works as “images of our shared psychology” and “slide plates of reality….threatening a social earthquake in which the otherwise seamless fabric of corporate culture is ripped.” 

Included in the Kearns show are works such as Affirmative Action, painting about government action that forced more women into the workforce at lower wages, and Down by Law, with its image of a cowboy hurtling through space as the neoclassical columns of the Federal Courthouse in New York loom in the background. 

In her catalogue essay, critic Eleanor Heartney states that “Karens’ work is passionate and engaged. He dares to take a stand, he expresses outrage at the persistence of injustice, he exposes the cynical manipulation of history for ideological ends. In the process he suggests that the fashionable postmodern detachment is itself a new mythology.” 

Kearns has been the recipient of the Prix de Rome, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Massachusetts State Council for the Arts. His works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY; The Frederick R. Weisman Collections, Los Angeles; and, the National Gallery in Berlin.