Kelly Burke’s artwork explores the dissolution of material and figurative imagery, revealing the abstract essence and energy of her lived experience. Drawing from her inner world and psyche, she reflects on moments shaped by mental health—both deeply challenging and profoundly beautiful. These experiences are translated into her work through color, form, and the physicality of paint itself.

Through repetitive processes of layering, removal, and reapplication, Burke builds complex surfaces marked by automatic scrawling, scratching, and gestural mark-making. These actions mirror her internal landscape and way of thinking—at times rough and abrasive, at others gentle and fluid.

Burke received her B.F.A. in Painting and Art History from Siena Heights University in 2007. Her studies led to an interest in abstraction, as well as South and East Asian Buddhist art and thought. Without a religious upbringing, she began to see how spiritual exploration could merge with her art-making practice. This way of thinking informs her life beyond the studio, influencing other aspects of her life, including her relationship to food, nature, and empathy toward others.

She has exhibited and sold her work for decades, and her paintings are held in private collections and businesses in the Detroit area and across the country. Her work was recently acquired by the Kresge Foundation.

About the Exhibition

Interiority is Kelly Burke’s first major solo show.  

Her work centers on painting as an act of self-preservation. In a world that is increasingly fast, immaterial, and digitally mediated, the physical act of making—of touching, layering, scraping, and reworking paint by hand—becomes a necessary return to the body. The studio is a space of retreat, where the inward self can take form beyond the constraints of language.  

These works emerge through an intuitive process of accumulation and erasure. Layers are built up and broken down, marked by scrawling gestures, abrasions, and moments of stillness. The surfaces hold a record of this push and pull—of tension and release, fragmentation and cohesion. Painting, in this sense, becomes both a solitary and deeply personal act, at times even a selfish one, rooted in the need to process, to hold, and to continue.

Yet the work is not closed. While grounded in an internal landscape, each painting extends an invitation outward. Viewers are encouraged to engage with the formal elements—color, form, texture, and movement—and to encounter their own emotional responses within the work. Meaning is not fixed, but felt: shifting, subjective, and open.

Interiority proposes painting as both refuge and offering—an embodied practice that resists disconnection, and a space where inner experience can be shared without needing to be explained.

Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm

Other viewings available by appointment.