NEW YORK, NY.- Driscoll Babcock Galleries presents Jenny Morgan: How To Find A Ghost, Jenny Morgans first solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Morgan pushes her transcendent figurative paintings to a larger scale, the pure magnitude of which amplifies the psychological intimacy of her work.
Despite the immediacy of her figures, Morgans deep insights into her subjects emerge slowly over time; their blurred features, sanded outlines, and unique coloration push her portraits toward a revelatory abstraction.
Morgans genre of realism is entirely her own. Technically intricate but experimental, ostensible yet mysterious, she obscures the physical to illuminate the spiritual. This constant search to reveal and express the spiritual is Morgans ongoing struggleto express what she feels and knows, but cant see. Morgans exhibition both acknowledges and offers tools for recognizing the invisible lives reflected within and around us.
Included in the exhibition is the triptych KINGS AND QUEENS, a format new to the artist. The large oil painting is composed of a self-portrait and four additional personages from Morgans life who recur throughout her body of work. The five figures are naked and frontal, their explicit bareness tempered with raw fragility and meditative strength. Embodying the psycho-social dichotomy that often exists in the artists canvases, they appear to occupy their own realm, contemplating themselves and their bodies, and seeking balance between the id and the super-ego.
In MOTHER, Morgans iconic dotsmetaphoric windows to the soul and symbols of the protective spiritemanate from where the babys fingers rest against her mothers breast, an allegorical testimony to the undeniable link between mother and child. The mood here appears at once tender and provocative while the dramatic light and intense color scheme subtly vie with the characters to unlock the paintings narrative. As in all of Morgans work, her figures seem to hover between the subconscious and the conscious, revealing something of herself while physically representing others.
Jenny Morgan has been exclusively represented by Driscoll Babcock Galleries since 2012. Morgans work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally in solo exhibitions at galleries in Brooklyn, NY and Denver, Colorado; and in numerous group exhibitions including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C.; 92Y Tribeca and the Le Roy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, both in New York, NY; and at galleries in Orlando, Florida; London, England; and Falun, Sweden. Additionally, Morgan has realized several portraiture commissions for the likes of The New York Times Magazine and New York Magazine. Her work is represented in major private collections throughout the United States.
Born in Salt Lake City, UT, Jenny Morgan currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA from the Rocky Mountain College School of Design in Lakewood, CO and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY.