Paul Jenkins was an American artist known for his abstract expressionist paintings. He used unusual techniques to create bold and colourful compositions. Abandoning the paintbrush altogether, Jenkins poured paint directly onto his canvas, tilting it to encourage pigment to pool, drip and bleed. By rejecting tradition, Jenkins became an important part of the second wave of Abstract Expressionism.
Read MoreJenkins was influenced by an eclectic array of writers, artists, and thinkers including Carl Jung, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gustave Moreau and Mark Rothko.
Jenkins was born in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri. Between 1936 and 1941 he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute where he painted landscapes in watercolour. While he was studying, Jenkins's spent weekends and summers working at a local ceramics factory, an experience that would heavily influence his tactile methods of painting.
In 1948, Jenkins moved to New York where he studied at the Art Students League of New York. While there, the artist worked alongside artists Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Morris Kantor. He began to spend time with other abstract expressionist artists, including Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.
After travelling around Europe between 1953 and 1954, Jenkins returned to New York where he moved into an art studio on St. Marks Place. He began to paint large-scale compositions heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement.
In 1955, he had his first solo exhibition at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle. Shortly after, he participated in his first one person show in New York at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Throughout the next few decades, Jenkins split his time working between New York and Paris, exhibiting widely in solo and group exhibitions.
Jenkins is known for his unique and experimental artistic process. By pouring paint directly onto the canvas, he would direct the pigments flow using blade-like devices. His manipulation of the flow of paint on canvas was influenced by his observation of the effects of glazing in ceramics.
Jenkins' vivid colour palette is typically bold and bright, adopting deeply saturated colours. His unusual painterly style and rich tones create luminous and abstract compositions that appear to move and change with the light.
Paul Jenkins is best known for his Phenomena paintings. After becoming an established abstract expressionist, the artist began to refer to himself as an 'abstract phenomenist'. He believed that his paintings embodied spiritual reflections on the present moment.
In Phenomena paintings, Jenkins depicts flowing veils of colour that overlap and interact with one another. Each artwork features transparent and opaque abstract forms that seep and bleed vivid colour. The work demonstrates Jenkins' visceral painting method and attention to interactions between colour, texture, and form.
Influenced by Goethe's colour theories and the writings of Carl Jung and Immanuel Kant, Jenkins began titling his work Phenomena followed by key words or phrases, often linked to the psychological and physiological experience of the world around him.
Each Phenomena painting embraces the idea that painting can expand the possibilities of abstract art by capturing a feeling or moment on paper. Speaking of his work Phenomena, Yonder Near (1964) Jenkins said, 'To me it has always been the image of the archetype of that which is near and that which is far in the instantaneous psychic moment. Now if anyone can actually paint such a feeling, idea, or image remains possibly for history to decide. It is a presumption on my part but after all, that is one of the expanding possibilities of Abstract painting: that which makes something felt which is not explicitly seen.'
Paul Jenkins' artwork is included in the collections of several major galleries and art institutions.
Selected collections include National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; Centre Georges Pompidou and Musée national d'art Moderne, Paris; Tate, London; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Paul Jenkins has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions.
Select solo exhibitions include Cast of Shadows, The Redfern Gallery, London (2020); Local Color, The San Jose Museum of Art, California (2012); Paul Jenkins, The Redfern Gallery, London (2011); Paul Jenkins, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (2010); Paul Jenkins in the 1960s and 1970s: Space, Colour and Light, D. Wigmore Fine Art, New York (2009); Paul Jenkins, The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville (2009); and Paul Jenkins, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York (2009).
Select group exhibitions include Wild and Brilliant : The Martha Jackson Gallery and Post-War Art, Hollis Taggart Gallery, New York (2021); Local Color, The San Jose Museum of Art, California (2012); Abstract Expressionism: Then and Now, Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan (2012); Fragments 1915-2011: Modern and Contemporary Collage, ACA Galleries, New York (2011); and Colour Moves Surface, Lorenzelli Arte, Milan (2011)__.
Paul Jenkins website can be found here.
Phoebe Bradford | Ocula | 2022
