MASSIMODECARLO Milano, known for championing both established and emerging artists is now showing Rainbows in Shadows, the first solo exhibition in the city by New York-based painter Jenna Gribbon. Opening on the 5th of June, and running until September, we see Gribbon’s signature observation and intimacy, often painting those close to her, subjects include her wife, friends and fellow artists, and they’re captured in everyday, domestic settings.
Her artwork is anchored in her point of view, often painted from her exact perspective, placing the viewer in her position and inviting them to see what she sees. This creates a direct and deliberate experience that blurs the line between subject, painter and observer, quietly questioning how we see others and what it means to see with intent.
“You kissed your wife this morning. Did you look at her? How intently? Tonight when you see her again she won’t be the same. Same as what?
As your memory of her or as the way she really is?”
A short text by her wife and reoccurring presence in her paintings, musician Mackenzie Scott, accompanies the exhibition and perfectly in line with the artwork, reflects on the way perception constantly shifts, how a person can appear different depending on light, time and emotion. The rainbow, only visible under specific conditions, becomes a metaphor for the fragile nature of intimacy and attention.
“To speak further of improbable magic, a rainbow is illusory in the sense that it can only be perceived under specific conditions, depending namely on two factors: there must droplets of water in the air to refract the light into the observer’s eyes and the observer must be at a vantage point from whence it can be perceived. The observer must be positioned with their back to the sun and their shadow before them—only then can they see a rainbow,” says Mackenzie Scott.
Part of a growing group of contemporary painters rethinking how intimacy and identity are shown on canvas, Gribbon lives and works in Brooklyn, and her work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, SFMOMA, the Dallas Museum of Art, MAMCO Geneva and Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
For further information massimodecarlo.com.
