JENNA GRIBBON

Early Years

Jenna Gribbon was born in 1978 in Knoxville, Tennessee. She studied painting at the University of Georgia and later earned an MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Gribbon lives and works in Brooklyn, where her personal life and studio practice often intersect. Her long-standing interest in the history of painting—particularly as it relates to power, desire and gender—has helped shape her visually arresting depictions of queer intimacy, domestic life, and the complexities of the gaze.

Artworks

Jenna Gribbon’s artworks blend lush, expressive brushwork with conceptual rigour, often portraying lovers, friends, and self-portraits that foreground the act of painting as both subject and process.

Painting the Gaze

Gribbon is particularly known for examining the dynamics of the gaze—how we look and how we are looked at. In many works, she depicts her partner Mackenzie Scott gazing back at the viewer, reversing traditional power structures in painting. The act of looking is not passive but charged with tension, desire, and self-awareness. Paintings like The Back of the Painter’s Head (2021) complicate our position as viewers, reminding us that we too are being watched. Gribbon captures the psychological drama of mutual observation with seductive, gestural strokes that emphasise the intimacy of her scenes.

Queer Intimacy and Role-play

Gribbon’s interest in role-play and performativity has led to a series of playful yet provocative paintings that explore queer desire through unconventional framing. In works such as Roleplay, I’m the Doctor (2022), costumes, props, and performative gestures become tools for both empowerment and affection. These paintings depict queer love not as a fixed narrative but as a shifting, improvisational script. Her figures are caught mid-performance, evoking a sense of theatre as well as genuine connection. Through her painterly language—alternating between lush precision and looser brushwork—Gribbon captures the humour, sensuality, and complexity of modern queer intimacy.

Painting as Performance

Gribbon frequently disrupts the illusionistic quality of her paintings by incorporating visible painterly “mistakes” or unfinished zones, drawing attention to the artifice of the image. In her Uscapes series, figures often appear to melt into abstract backgrounds, their bodies dissolving into fields of colour that evoke emotion rather than realism. By deliberately exposing the process of painting—through visible underpainting, brushstrokes, and compositional breaks—she reframes painting as an active, time-based performance. These works resist resolution, leaving space for ambiguity and open interpretation. Gribbon’s approach foregrounds painting as an embodied, reciprocal act between artist, subject, and viewer.

Exhibitions

Jenna Gribbon has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions at important institutions and blue-chip galleries. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Rainbows in Shadow, Massimo De Carlo, Milan (2025)
• Like Looking in a Mirror, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2024)
• The Honeymoon Show!, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2023)
• Agnes V. par Jenna G., Sim Smith, London (2021)
• When I Looked at You the Light Changed, Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2019)

Group Exhibitions

• Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2025)
• From Dawn Til Dusk: The Shadow in Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2025)
• Day for Night: New American Realism, Palazzo Barberini, Rome (2024)
• Friends & Lovers, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023)
• Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, The Frick Collection, New York (2022)
• Women Painting Women, curated by Andrea Karnes, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth (2022)

Instagram

Jenna Gribbon’s Instagram can be found here.

Critical Reception

Jenna Gribbon’s work has been featured in leading art publications such as Artnet News, Cultured Mag, and Interview Magazine. Speaking to Ocula Magazine in 2022, Gribbon explains: ‘A common misunderstanding is that my work is about intimacy, which it’s not. It’s just as much about a sort of constructed intimacy or consuming what we think of as other people’s intimate moments, which maybe aren’t intimate at all.’

Jenna Gribbon FAQs

Ocula | 2025