Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Jackie Gendel: Portraits, an exhibition of new paintings.
Gendel makes conceptualized portraits that are hybrids of historical figures, friends, subjects from other paintings and anonymous photographs. Each painting explores both the process and results of imaging the human form.
With thin and loose applications of paint, Gendel layers one image on top of another in a method that creates identities that are not fixed, but mutable. This piling up and accumulation of images suggests various psychological states: pensive and curious, anxious and surprised, sad and lost. Men and women, alone or in groupings, seem caught off guard, unaware and unsure.
A sense of history and time passing is evoked in these paintings, both in the build up of the figures and the quoting of various painting styles. Gendel seems to acknowledge that ghosts do indeed exist: both as individuals and in art history. Or, as William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead. In fact, it’s not even past”.