Jenna Gribbon is an American figurative painter. The act of looking itself is the central concern of her practice, catching her viewers in a 'scopophilic feedback loop' whereby the inherent voyeurism of their gaze and that of the artist is made the spectacle.
Read MoreOften using her partner and loved ones as models, Gribbon references the visual language of various art historical movements—from Rococo to Impressionism—to recreate private moments, aimed at showing a kind of intimacy that resists objectification.
Gribbon was born in Knoxville in 1978 and had a transient childhood, moving back and forth between Tennessee and Georgia until leaving at the age of 18. Despite always having an interest in art, her defining inspiration came in the form of a 7th Grade school trip to a small Nashville museum—her first exposure to the works of major artists in the flesh. This experience cemented her love for Impressionist Mary Cassatt, whose fluid brushstrokes and tender subject matter remain at the heart of Gribbon's practice.
Gribbon earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia in 2001 before moving to New York City, where she worked as a waitress in a strip club, and also in Jeff Koons' studio.
After a year at Koon's studio, Gribbon supported herself with commissioned work, one notably being three artworks for Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette (2006) in the style of Rococo painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. During this time, the artist and her then-husband, writer Julian Tepper, established a creative salon The Oracle Club in Queens which also housed her studio. In 2019, Gribbon returned to education, graduating from Hunter College with her Master of Fine Arts.
Drawing inspiration largely from her girlfriend and muse, Torres singer Mackenzie Scott, Gribbon creates artworks that are as personal as they are sensuous.
Using loose but precise strokes of oil paint, she creates scenes that replicate snapshots from a phone camera—largely angled downwards from hip height—that implicate both her and her viewer's presence within the artwork. Jenna Gribbon's paintings range greatly in scale from incredibly small to monumental, and her colour palette remains rooted in naturalism, with the exception of neon pink nipples and occasional shadows cast in lavender or turquoise shades.
After initially wrestling with the burden of being a figurative painter in the contemporary art scene, Gribbon tried to alleviate its problematic elements by removing the figure entirely.
Her early work at Hunter College focused on landscape abstractions in the style of Romantic painter Thomas Gainsborough, and a large 'X' in place of its human counterpart. However, the artist found that in removing the complication, she removed the crux of her artworks, leaving them 'simultaneously lush and empty.' From that point, her approach to depicting figures became almost performatively self-conscious.
In an attempt to counter the 'eroticised gaze' long-established in Western art history, Gribbon consciously uses similar visual language to give the subjects of her paintings greater agency. Her works became a collaborative process, using friends and fellow artists as models with the suggestion of her own participation in the scenes.
In the oil painting Chrissy Taking Reference Photos for Her Paintings (2017), she captures a group of women artists nude in a friend's backyard during a salon. The play of sunlight and the pastoral setting self-consciously recalls Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) but the subjects are instead too absorbed in their own process of creation to look out from the canvas.
Inspired by her first encounter with French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda when she was 20, Gribbon produced a body of work in direct dialogue with stills from her documentary L'Opéra-Mouffe (1958). The paintings showed Scott and Gribbon's friends watching Varda's films projected in her New York home, often captioned by the subtitles displayed on the projector, as in You Want Me To Pose Nude (2021). Through furtive glances, and engaging stares, Gribbon presented what she describes as 'layers of looking,' a concern which was central to Varda's filmmaking.
Gribbon's 2021 exhibition uscapes, presented at Fredericks & Freiser in New York, displayed intimate but simultaneously staged scenes between herself and Scott in a bid to confront the viewer with their own voyeurism.
Her two-metre canvases were cropped from below the artist's nude waist so that the viewer assumes her point of view, Gribbon's legs often framing the scene and melting into those of her partner. She juxtaposed these works with much smaller bust portraits of Scott caught in quotidian tableaus—regarding her reflection in the mirror, clipping her toenails, urinating outdoors. In both series, Gribbon's use of light is much more deliberate, a lamp creating a halo around Scott's face in Interrogation lightscape (2021) and blinding her in Unwanted opinions (2021).
Gribbon has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include Unscapes, Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2021); I will wear you in my heart of heart, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); Agnès V. par Jenna Gribbon, Simm Smith, London (2021); Regarding Me Regarding You, GYNP Gallery, Berlin (2020); I promise I won't paint you while you're sleeping, Modern Love Club Gallery, New York (2017).
Group exhibitions include The view of the feminine from Albrecht Dürer to Cindy Sherman, Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg (2021); Equal Affections, GRIMM, Amsterdam (2021); Women in Paris, Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2021); Portraiture One Century Apart, Massimo de Carlo, London (2021); Romancing the mirror, MoCA, Jacksonville (2020); If On a Winters Night a Traveler, Mamoth, London (2020).
Jenna Gribbon's Instagram can be found here.
Annie Curtis | Ocula | 2021
