Jenna Gribbon Debuts at David Kordansky Gallery

‘I think the through line in my work has been the “looking at the looking”,’ Jenna Gribbon told Ocula in 2022.

In staging this dynamic, Gribbon positions herself within her portraiture—including a part of her body, for instance, or a glimpse of her shadow—interacting with her wife Mackenzie Scott.

Now, it’s Gribbon’s son who’s the focus of her portraits, which are on view in Like Looking in a Mirror, her solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles (13 September–19 October 2024). This new direction is in an effort to explore the traits, features, and mannerisms shared between parent and child.

However, these portraits are far from the straightforward framing of Madonna and Child. Rather, Gribbon explores the notion of sameness through experimenting with projectors as a tool to blur the lines between her face and her son’s.

In Me Prismatic and Fragmented, He More Concrete (2024), she presents a close-up of her son with an image of herself projected onto his cheek. The eyes, nose, and lips of the two individuals seem almost identical—a result of physical layering both images.

These large-scale canvases are brimming corner to corner with tight crops of figures’ heads, shoulders, and limbs, offering close-up readings of the tender relationship between mother and child.

Gribbon has dismissed readings of intimacy in her work, rather viewing her paintings as images of ‘constructed intimacy’—what we think of as other people’s intimate moments may not be at all. This concept has previously been conveyed in her paintings through the inclusion of props such as clamp lights, projectors, and mirrors, so we as viewers are able see the mechanisms that shape these not-so-intimate moments.

These latest paintings feature similar behind-the-scenes tools—reflective surfaces and mirrors—but in this context, they’re employed to explore the idea of doppelgängers and how children can be perceived as a projection of their parents.

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, is planning a major solo exhibition of Gribbon’s work, tentatively scheduled for the second half of 2026. The planned show will be a comprehensive survey covering 25 years of her painting. —[O]

Main image: Jenna Gribbon, A Reflection Held (2024). Oil on linen. 203.2 x 162.6 x 3.5 cm. © Jenna Gribbon. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Christopher Stach.