Jon Key paints vibrant, playful depictions of Black and queer subjects. His images pair reductive forms with dynamic geometries, resulting in a bold and graphic style. Key has widely exhibited in New York City, and his work The Man in the Violet Suit (Red No. 1) was a highlight of Christie’s 2021 Say It Loud: Visionaries of Self auction of work by emerging and mid-career Black artists curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton. Key’s practice is informed by atrocities like the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, and he uses a four-color palette of green, black, violet, and red to invoke the throughlines of narratives with regard to Southerness, Blackness, queerness, and family. His canvases create and claim metaphorical safe spaces for QTPOC whose elongated bodies fill the entire frames of his works. Teeming with connotations that reside just below their hard-edged surfaces and pairing moments of touch with distant expressions, Key’s works carry underlying tensions while asserting a pointed bodily presence.

Jon Key

American

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Young Gifted and Black (Poster)