Jack Balas pursues themes simultaneously potent and abstract to create his challenging and deeply felt work.  An unpredictable placement of words, phrases, gestural marks, photographic imagery and collaged materials create the visual and conceptual texture of Balas’ work.  Jack Balas works in painting, photography, writing, and other media. He has received an individual fellowship in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts and a creative fellowship in photography from the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities.  He has exhibited extensively in both the United States and Europe, including exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago’s Gallery 2, the Tuscon Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.  His work can be found in many notable permanent collections, including the Kent Logan Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  A portfolio of his paintings was published in The Paris Review.

Since the mid-1990’s, Jack Balas and Wes Hempel have been collaborating on unique works, creating a compelling dialogue between these two distinct artists.  Hempel’s neo-classicist style combines with Balas’ complex associative vocabulary to infuse the work with a sharp wit, surprising surface, and rare sense of intimacy.