Kady JLKR

Kady JLKR (Janet Ruttenberg) began painting at the age of five under the tutelage of an accomplished uncle, Abel Warshawsky, and by age eight she was spending summers studying in advanced programs at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her mother sent her to boarding school at age fourteen, she says, to prevent her from staying up all night painting. The plan had no effect.

She went on to study art at the University of Iowa under master printmaker Mauricio Lasansky. After her formal training, she deconstructed the canon, painstakingly copying beloved paintings and prints in order to tease out their secrets. With subsequent moves to Chicago and then to New York, and while raising four children and through the ensuing decades, she has continued to paint in the same enthralled, observant manner. There is a seductive blend of unfettered exuberance, technical mastery, and allusions to famous antecedents in Kady JLKR’s works. Her mature work maintains the illusion of an artist encountering the world as though for the first time.

Kady JLKR’s works have been exhibited at the Dubuque Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Union Carbide Building in New York City, and recently in a Rail Curatorial Project exhibition, Singing in Unison, at Industry City in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress in Washington DC, among others.