JENNY MORGAN

Morgan’s idiosyncratic paintings embrace varying tropes of portraiture from the classical reclining female nude, to more conceptual approaches such as those explored in The Shadow’s Exquisite Game and The Descending. Each depicts a shadowy figure on a staircase—part impression, part silhouette. The pair were painted in discrete sections working from the bottom of the canvas up to the top, segmenting the painting step upon step, until the picture emerged wholly as a visual and metaphorical depiction of ascendance.

The eye, a carefully rendered and recurring motif in the exhibition, alludes to the idea of the witness, careful observers, and the self—the “window to the soul” or inner worlds. Chalky blue, the portrait of a woman in Visitor is surveilled by a mysterious planchette, a shard of all-seeing glass cutting through her solitude and singularity. Statuesque, draped in gauzy green, The Patron locks eyes with the viewer, her expression stern, she stands almost accusatory. Morgan breaks apart the reality of her solidness with the left hand which seems to be melting or melding into her sheer dress. Ominous or omniscient, Watcher disrupts the realism of “portraiture” to a pair of eyes—one hovering above the other. These oculi ebb in and out of the painting’s ground, which Morgan has built up into a foamy viridian haze; in this and many other works Morgan adds and removes pigments which seep through to the fore, playing with each painting’s depth of field, evoking impermanence.

There is a razor’s edge quality to the calm precision of Morgan’s deliberate brush stroke, which can be quick and expressive as well as invisible and exact. She introduces texture and rhythm with some subjects rendered solid inhabiting real space, while others rise in and out of focus, occasionally merging with their surroundings—whether wood grain, draped fabrics, or fine-haired furs. Subtle interruptions in continuity occur in works such as Sleep Study, which is bisected by the seam of two canvases sutured together. Or a spiral stitched into the canvas of The Shadow’s Exquisite Game as a weird magical symbol, an opening, a moving through something.

No Endings for the Wild is a personal idiom, coined by the artist, which puts a positive play on the expression “no rest for the wicked.” The phrase relates to the dualities of wild, animal, and embodied experience of being alive in relation to the spiritual, ephemeral aspects of our nature. Hypnotic and euphoric, Morgan’s paintings oscillate between the personal, the iconographic, and the epic; situated in a lineage of historical portraiture, she captures the ritualistic moment, the root connection between artist and muse.

Jenny Morgan (b. 1982 Salt Lake City, UT) holds a BA from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, Denver, CO and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. Her first solo museum exhibition Skin Deep with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver took place in 2017. Morgan has had solo exhibitions in New York, London, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Summer Lovin’ at Stems Gallery, Paris, France; Corpo e Mente at LVH Art, Venice, Italy; If you forget my name, you will go astray at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; and Women of Now at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX. Her work is in the permanent collections of several public museums including Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL; Purdue University Art Gallery, West Lafayette, IN; Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL; Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI; UNiversity of Maryland’s Stamp Student Union Art Collection, College Park, MD; New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM; and Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI. Morgan lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.