Howard’s is proud to present a show of new paintings by New York based Jenna Gribbon. The show will consist of 6 recently completed small paintings. The opening will be Saturday February 1st, from 6-8 pm, in conjunction with Becky Kolsrud at Tif Sigfrids. Jenna is a former Athens resident and a graduate of the University of Georgia.
Jenna Gribbon’s work is an opulent immersion into the medium and history of painting. She paints portraits, domestic scenes, and staged events with an ecstatic lushness and staggering skill. The paintings feature friends and lovers with an electric intimacy. She revels in the fiction of painting; indiosyncratic realities emerge from a swirl of virtuosic brush work, color, and light. The spaces she creates are familiar at times, but difficult to pin down- touches of the real meld seamlessly with fantasy and memory. Hints of Fragonard, Sargent, and Cassatt color a cinematic surrealism.
Stephanie as Anne of Avonlea, oil on canvas, 11” x 14”, 2020
The portraits in this show feature close friends of Jenna’s cast as fictional characters and cultural figures that have intrigued her since childhood. From the artist:
GAY GAY GAY! This is a common refrain coming from my girlfriend when I’m speaking about touchstones of my ostensibly straight past. Me: “Wait, even Pollyanna is gay??” Her: “Polyanna is a gay icon!” I can usually see her point. The result of there being almost no lesbian representation in culture is that everything is up for grabs. Lesbians are adept at claiming erotic space where it wasn’t intended for them, or at filling in elaborate imaginative gaps when homoeroticism is implied but not explicitly stated. Similarly, since most lesbians grow up in places where there are “no lesbians” (I for one didn’t know a single out lesbian until I was an adult), female friendships in youth can be preternaturally intimate or imaginatively eroticized as well. So here are some hyper-romantic portraits of my friends and my girlfriend as fictional characters or cultural figures I fixated on in my youth and adolescence. They are intentionally not explicitly homoerotic; their gayness rests in the gaze of the beholder. Like my wrestling paintings, which superimposed a present moment on one from the past, these paintings concern themselves with the interplay of image and memory in an effort to look at the tools we use to construct personal narrative, the faces we put on our past.
Jenna Gribbon was born and raised in Knoxville, TN, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Hunter College and BFA from Georgia. She had a solo exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, NY, in fall of 2019. Recent group exhibitions include To Paint is to Love Again, curated by Olivier Zahm, at Nino Mier Gallery, LA; Them, at Perrotin, NY, and Paint, Also Known As Blood: Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting, at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw.