New York City - The June Kelly Gallery opens its fall season with an exhibition of paintings by Victor Kord entitled Algorithm and Blues - new work that teems with provocative color, form and imagery. Kord’s paintings will be on view at the gallery, through September 30.

Kord describes his work as “the product of appropriated or found shapes from popular newspaper advertisements. I compose, manipulate, select palettes, and create surfaces upon which these shapes are arranged, often in intuitive ways.”

Although the exhibition title suggests a calculated step by step approach to painting and the use of repetition, Kord says he relies on “the randomness of appropriation to establish an order beyond the reach of one’s imagination.” His use of the word, “Blues,” in the exhibition title, he comments, “refers to their appeal to our emotions, for my paintings are about the contest between intuition and arithmetic.”

In Kord’s work, there is geometric order that references the scientific. It is subtle but present. It underlies the rich color and the solid form, which serve as visual protagonists.

“In my paintings, these elements collide — the rational and the expressive — and activate the work,“ he says. “It’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek play on the musical form of “Rhythm and Blues.”

Kord retired as a professor of painting at Cornell University after a teaching career that spanned more than 40 years. He has shown his paintings extensively throughout the country and internationally since 1967, at such venues as the Kathryn Sermas Gallery, New York; André Emmerich Gallery, New York; Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT.

He has received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is represented in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Madison Art Center of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, among others.

The June Kelly Gallery shows the works of young and emerging artists, as well as mid-career and established artists. The gallery’s major focus is contemporary painting, sculpture and photography, both abstract and figurative. The gallery was established in 1986 and is a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). Before opening the gallery, June Kelly, the director, had been a private dealer for many years. In addition, she had managed the career of artist Romare Bearden for 13 years until his death in 1988. Visit June Kelly Gallery at : www.junekellygallery.com/