The Artist as Channel

Jenny Morgan has long occupied an unusual position within contemporary figurative painting. At first glance, her work appears rooted in the traditions of portraiture: luminous flesh; careful observation; and a technical fluency that recalls the discipline of Old Master paintings. Yet the longer one spends with her canvases, the more unstable those first impressions become. Bodies dissolve into the atmosphere. Faces emerge only to disappear beneath translucent veils of paint. Figures seem simultaneously present and absent, caught somewhere between material reality and psychological projection.

“I’m constantly absorbing what surrounds me,” the artist explained on a call from her studio in Brooklyn. “Images I encounter, fragments of the environment, various colors, those elements find their way into the paintings almost subconsciously. Part of the reason I’m interested in portraiture is because I’m interested in the tension between these more graphic, immediate qualities and the quieter, highly-rendered passages of the body, especially the face, hands, and other areas that hold a kind of physical vulnerability.”