Jenny Gagalka

For her first exhibition at the gallery, Jenny Gagalka presents a suite of still lives of seemingly ordinary boxes.  These boxes are all depicted in vibrant shades of blues, yellows, whites, grays, pinks, and purples.  They are arranged in singular, sibling, and stacked compositions, filling the picture plane and spilling out from the edge.  The boxes’ flaps face out towards the viewer and are agape.  She intermingles surface and interior painted space via foreshortening, obscuring or revealing the boxes' interiors. Some are only slightly ajar, others are wide-mouthed, and then others are seemingly torn open with fully exposed insides. 

As in her last series, Jenny works by obsessively and repeatedly painting the same object in the studio. The paintings function as a sort of record keeper that renders a different psychological temperature each time.  Her approach is painterly and verges on abstraction, animating her subject matter into a lively state through high velocity, almost frenetic applications of Flashe.  She manipulates light, shape, scale, and orientation in each work, producing distinctive projective sites, moribund yet possessing signs of life.

Pop Secret, the title of the exhibition, refers to the mass-market popcorn brand whose packaging, designed to be maximally visible in the world, Jenny depicts here.  The paintings, with their qualities of touch and distance, move between intimacy and detachment, those sensations that seem to always follow early seduction and beckoning.