Kelly Reemtsen Puts a Gilded Edge on the Question of Who a Woman Really Is

A new screenprint trio, one of them dusted in real gold leaf, marks Kelly Reemtsen’s first release on Phillips Dropshop, timed to her Los Angeles solo show.

A woman shows up in three different screenprints, and in each one she is dressed for a different version of herself. That is the premise behind Kelly Reemtsen‘s first release, an auction house’s platform for limited edition works sold directly to collectors rather than through the saleroom. The three prints, titled Blown Away, Strike, and Hit A New High, arrived together this year, each built around Reemtsen’s now familiar view sig: a stylish, faceless woman gripping a tool that was traditionally handed to men.

The premise, as Phillips frames it in the release notes for the drop, asks a plain question. We all have different sides and different realities, so how do we manage to be all of those things across a single day. Do people see us differently than we see ourselves. Reemtsen has spent close to three decades circling that question in paint, and the new prints carry it into a slightly different register, one built around reflection and shine rather than the flat white grounds that made her paintings recognizable in the first place.

Hit A New High is the one drawing the most attention among the three, partly because of its title and partly because of what happens to it in its rarer form. Phillips issued the image as a standard edition of 25, priced at 2,500 dollars unframed, and as a five piece run of artist’s proofs finished with hand applied 24 karat gold leaf, priced at 3,000 dollars. Both the standard gold proof and its Blown Away and Strike Gold counterparts sold out fast enough that only the regular edition of Hit A New High remained listed as available at the time this piece was filed.

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Hit A New High is an 11 color screenprint on Coventry Rag 320 gsm white vellum, printed at an image size of 20 by 20 inches on a 26 by 26 inch sheet. Each impression is signed and dated by Reemtsen in the lower right corner and numbered by hand in the lower left, a detail that matters to print collectors because it confirms the artist reviewed and approved the specific sheet rather than a proof pulled off a larger, unsupervised run. The gold proof edition carries an additional layer of hand work: after the eleven colors are laid down, a printer applies 24 karat gold leaf by hand to selected passages of the image, so no two artist’s proofs in that five piece run are identical in the same way a painting would not be.

Color is doing most of the storytelling here. Reemtsen’s paintings have always leaned on a stark white background to isolate her subject, and the new prints push that same contrast into saturated pinks and oranges that read almost sunburned against the paper. The tool in the subject’s grip, per Reemtsen’s own recurring logic, is not incidental. She has said in past interviews that the tools double as psychological cues, so a blunt or aggressive object signals a complicated task ahead, while something lighter suggests an easier one. Reading Hit A New High that way, the title itself starts to feel less like branding and more like a caption for whatever the figure in the print is bracing to do.

This contemporary figurative painting combines fashion-inspired imagery with play geometric elements, depicting a cropped female figure in metallic gold boots holding a pink golf club. Soft pastel tones, gold leaf-like accents, and floating circles create a vibrant composition that balances pop aesthetics with refined minimalism.

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None of this exists without Serio Press, the fine art print studio that began in Los Angeles and now operates outside Austin, Texas. Reemtsen has worked with Serio Press master printer Tony Clough for nearly 15 years, a run long enough that the studio credits the collaboration with shaping how her prints get made rather than just executing a design she hands over. Clough built his career at Modern Multiples before starting his own shop in a subleased studio in Boyle Heights in 2013, eventually growing Serio Press into an operation that has produced editions for artists across genres, and Reemtsen has described the shared studio time as the part of printmaking she enjoys most, a contrast to the long solitary hours of her painting practice.

That kind of continuity shows in the technical ambition of a piece like Hit A New High. An 11 color screenprint means eleven separate passes, each one requiring its own screen, its own registration, and its own drying time before the next layer goes down. Add hand applied gold leaf on top of that for the artist’s proof run and the printing becomes closer to a collaborative studio practice than a mechanical reproduction of a painting, which is presumably the point of releasing it through a dedicated fine art print studio rather than a general commercial printer.

Serio Press describes its own specialty as hand pulled serigraph editions across small, medium, and large formats, a somewhat old fashioned way of putting it that still gets at what separates a studio like Clough’s from a large scale commercial print house. Every screen in an eleven color run has to be pulled by hand, cleaned, and reset for the next color, and any drift in registration between passes shows up immediately in a figurative image like Reemtsen’s, where a half millimeter shift can blur the edge of a jawline or a sleeve. The studio’s own account of its history describes Clough starting out of a 300 square foot subleased space in Boyle Heights after being laid off from a previous printing job in 2013, then growing the operation enough to relocate first to South Central Los Angeles and later outside Austin, expanding a client list that now extends well beyond any single artist’s output.

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The Phillips release did not happen in isolation. It landed alongside Fool’s Gold, Reemtsen’s solo exhibition at Albertz Benda in Los Angeles, which ran from April 2 through May 8, 2026, with photography of the installation credited to Julian Calero. Phillips describes the print drop as extending the show’s exploration of reflection, illusion, and the pull of shine, which lines up with the exhibition’s title: gold that looks valuable from a distance can turn out to be worth nothing at all once someone gets close enough to test it.

Albertz Benda has represented Reemtsen for years, including a run of gallery pieces such as Belted, Focal Points, Hard to Handle, and The Big Pitch that predate Fool’s Gold, and the gallery has staged multiple solo presentations of her work at both its New York and Los Angeles locations. The gallery itself, founded in 2015 by Thorsten Albertz and Marc Benda, built its program around solo shows and thematic group exhibitions with an emphasis on materiality, which makes Reemtsen’s thick impasto and now her gold leafed prints a fairly natural fit for the roster.

This contemporary figurative painting juxtaposes glamour and industrial symbolism, portraying a cropped female figure in metallic gold attire holding an electric chainsaw with a vivid pink power cord. Thick, expressive brushstrokes and reflective surfaces heighten the tension between elegance, power, and everyday machinery.

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Reemtsen was born in 1967 in Flint, Michigan, and her early training was not in fine art painting at all but in fashion design, first at Central Michigan University and then at California State University, Long Beach. That background matters more than a passing biographical detail. It shows up directly in the work: Reemtsen has said her figures are, in effect, dressed for a job, with clothing operating as its own visual language that signals personality and task before a viewer even registers what tool the figure is holding.

She has exhibited in the United States and abroad since 1996, and along the way trained further at Otis Parsons and at Art Center in Pasadena, while building a separate, parallel practice in printmaking that dates back to the early 1990s. She studied etching with printer Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio in New Hampshire and screenprinting with Tony Clough at what was then Serio Press in Los Angeles, plus a stint as an artist in residence at the Venice Printmaking Studio in Italy. That printmaking history is worth noting because it means Hit A New High is not a licensing exercise bolted onto a painter’s reputation. It comes out of a studio practice Reemtsen has kept running for three decades alongside her canvases.

Her most recent bodies of work, dating back a couple of years, have started pushing the tool wielding figure into new physical situations, including women shown climbing ladders or standing on chairs, a literalization of the glass ceiling that her earlier, more static compositions only implied. Reemtsen now lives and works between Los Angeles and London, and is represented by Albertz Benda in New York and Los Angeles, David Klein Gallery in Detroit, Lyndsey Ingram in London’s Mayfair district, and Galleri Oxholm in Copenhagen, a spread of representation that tracks with how far the work has traveled since her first shows in the mid 1990s.

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Reemtsen’s paintings sit in a mix of corporate and institutional collections, including the Twentieth Century Fox and AT&T corporate collections and the Flint Institute of Arts in her home city, alongside private collections in North America and abroad. The Phillips Dropshop release adds a new kind of access point on top of that history: rather than bidding at auction or buying through a gallery, a collector can purchase a signed, numbered print directly off the platform for a fixed price, with Phillips handling authentication, shipping, and a “know your client” verification step required for the purchase.

That structure puts Hit A New High in an unusual position relative to the rest of Reemtsen’s output. It is not a one off painting decided by a single collector’s bid, and it is not a mass produced poster either. It sits in the narrower category of hand signed, small edition prints made in direct collaboration with a master printer, sold through an auction house’s own retail arm rather than its saleroom. The gold leafed artist’s proofs sold out first, which tracks with how limited that particular run was against the standard edition’s 25 pieces. What remains, at least for now, is the standard edition of Hit A New High itself: eleven colors, a signed lower corner, and a figure holding whatever it is she is about to use.