"But you want to witness what you’re depicting. If you draw it, you’ll understand it. I try to have in my memory what I’m trying to achieve. I can close my eyes and see what I want."
— Neil Jenney
Neil Jenney is a canonical figure in the history of American painting. For nearly six decades, Jenney has reimagined Realism and landscapes, painting new life into pillars of the history of art. He has radically shifted aesthetic practices, even when it was contrary to widely popular movements or modes of painting. Some of his series of work include, “Bad Paintings,” and “Good Paintings,” Atmospheres, Biospheres, Aquatica, North American Vegetae, North America Depicted and Modern Africa. His work explores ecological, political and social issues, and more recently since his transition to oil painting (an entirely self-taught endeavor) have become meticulous in their execution and brushwork.
Having a self-described, inventors spirit and calling back to his earlier sculptural practice, his works predominantly function as painted sculptures. Framing canvases of various, and oftentimes particular measurements, are substantial, black frames whose construction recall the Shaker designs that populated his childhood in New England. Titles are stenciled either under the foreground, or on the lateral sides of the canvas, which speak to Jenney’s preoccupation with the concept of painting as artifice. His landscapes are intimate, and condensed, and depict fragmentary views instead of the more traditional, and widely practiced portrayal of sweeping, spatially profound vistas. For Jenney, the assemblage of all of these pictorial, and sculptural elements within a single work of art speak to the ancient Greek concept of viewing painting as the act of looking through a window. This further emphasizes the illusory nature of both creating and looking at a painting, which is central to keep in mind when approaching Jenney’s work. His work is direct, and void of ornamentation, and excess – they are elemental, radical and absolute.
Despite their depiction of subjects most typically associated with Realism, Jenney upends this facile classification and propels his work even further. He reconsiders Realism from a more ontological and probing point of view, and strips the narrative and message of a work down to its purest, essentialist form. He questions what painting and sculpture are, and how we understand them and ceases to push the boundaries of what painting and sculpture can do.
Neil Jenney was born in 1945, in Torrington, Connecticut, and attended the Massachusetts College of Art. He has had solo exhibitions at: Gagosian Gallery, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, Barbara Mathes Gallery and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum. His work is part of the permanent collection of the following institutions: Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Gallery, London, Whitney Museum, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Jenney lives and works in New York City.
