Jackie Gendel's pictures address the female figure while at the same time exploring pattern, collage-space and color. “I try to get to a place that is unexpected to me," Jackie Gendel writes. Working with an eye towards both art history and contemporary visual culture, the loose, interpretative feeling of Gendel's paintings not only engages our sense of the world today, but also reminds us of pieces by major Modernists such as Sophie Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova. These artists rejected the masculine markings of Modernism as well as many assumed hierarchical distinctions between design and fine arts that still resonate in our culture today, particularly when applied to "women's work."
“I paint people because the process of painting a portrait is similar to identity formation...the materials, the spills, the language, tells me who this person is becoming.” Gendel's direct mark-making plays off the subtle atmospheres she creates, back-stopping her gestured brushwork with flows of liquid color. “I keep on painting the heads and faces over and over again until they get to a place that feels resolved and poignant and mysterious.” Gendel’s figures gather, dance, talk and recline in gardens, theaters and drawing rooms: sometimes the bodies are faceless; in other works, the expressions themselves convey the atmosphere of a given piece.
Gendel notes that the people in her paintings are, “in different states of awareness.” Individual figures in Gendel's work play off groupings. People exist in pictorial spaces figured in the language of dance, operatic and theatrical design. Much of Jackie Gendel's recent work makes contradictory use of two of modernity’s most common conventions of image production: serial repetition of form and the sequential image of narrative. In Gendel's compositions, it can take time to differentiate between person and pattern, emphasizing narrative playfulness and mystery. Embracing a fluid approach, Gendel comments that she develops, “scenes, characters and situations through deliberate figuration, intuitive mark making, color and chance procedures,” often painting over works, or creating the same image in different colors and sizes to subvert the singular image. “They’re still figures of women, but they’re also shapes moving. It makes you think about the shift to abstraction.”
Jackie Gendel (b. 1973, Houston, TX) received a BA from Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO) and an MFA from Yale University (New Haven, CT). Jackie Gendel's work will be the subject of a major solo exhibtion at Philip Martin Gallery in June 2024. Her paintings were featured in the recent exhibition, "Pocket Universe" (Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA). Gendel has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at Inman Gallery (Houston, TX); SOCO Gallery (Charlotte, NC); Thomas Erben Gallery (New York, NY). Gendel’s work is included in the collections of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT); and Progressive Collection (Mayfield Village, OH). Gendel has been featured in publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, and Art Papers. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her an Academy Award in 2007. She participated in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program in 2010 and was an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in 2005. Gendel’s early work derived from her background in underground comics, a medium of “sequential image” storytelling, which she drew in the late ’90s for an upstart feminist webzine for teenage girls. Gendel lives and works in Providence, RI.