Jackie Gendel: The Architect’s Daughters

Philip Martin Gallery is delighted to present, “The Architect’s Daughters,” an exhibition of new paintings by Jackie Gendel. “The Architect’s Daughters” is Providence-based artist Jackie Gendel’s first solo show at Philip Martin Gallery.

Jackie Gendel’s paintings are an expressive world of color, pattern and materiality. Gendel’s loose brushwork activates a picture in which the eye constantly moves, navigating an interlocking vibrant pictorial space that bends like a reed before the viewer’s gaze. “I work in staircases,” Jackie Gendel notes, quoting French author Paul Virilio.

The interwoven meanings in Gendel’s work - pictorially, narratively - welcome as well as conceal. Working with an eye towards both art history and contemporary visual culture, the loose, interpretative feeling of Gendel’s paintings not only engages our sense of the world today, but also reminds us of pieces by major Modernists such as Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova. These artists rejected the masculine markings of Modernism as well as many assumed hierarchical distinctions between design and fine arts that still resonate in our culture today, particularly when applied to “women’s work.”

“I have been thinking about my relation to Modernism,” Jackie Gendel comments. In our current time of tremendous change and feeling it is hard not to look back on the modern period with some sense of awe. We ponder, Gendel writes, “past visions of the future, and why things have turned out the way they have, or haven’t turned out another way. How did we get here? Where are we?”

Jackie Gendel says that the people in her paintings are, “in different states of awareness.” Individual figures in Gendel’s work play off groupings. People exist in pictorial spaces figured in the language of dance, operatic and theatrical design. Much of Jackie Gendel’s recent work makes contradictory use of two of modernity’s most common conventions of image production: serial repetition of form and the sequential image of narrative. In Gendel’s compositions, it can take time to differentiate between person and pattern, emphasizing narrative playfulness and mystery. Embracing a fluid approach, Gendel comments that she develops, “scenes, characters and situations through deliberate figuration, intuitive mark making, color and chance procedures,” often painting over works, or creating the same image in different colors and sizes to subvert the singular image. “They’re still figures of women, but they’re also shapes moving. It makes you think about the shift to abstraction.”

Gendel’s paintings are filled with protagonists dancing, talking, acting upon a stage, coming together in groups. “I paint people because the process of painting a portrait is similar to identity formation...the materials, the spills, the language, tells me who this person is becoming.” Gendel’s direct mark-making plays off the subtle atmospheres she creates, back-stopping her gestured brushwork with flows of liquid color. Gendel’s figures are activated by the color and structure of the painting itself. They make a way for themselves through the world of the painting, coming together as if in a dream, walking in the dark.