Jackie Gendel creates a narrative between fragmented figures and settings of an unfixed age, time, location, and gender. The artist plays with relationships between characters and forms, pattern, and rich color.
Pulling from a number of art historical and cultural sources, including, but not limited to, Art Deco, German Expressionism, Orphism, Futurism, Constructivism and nonobjective painting, the artist also looks towards early 20th century theater, fashion and textile designs.
Gendel’s subjects flow from the contradictions of past social and aesthetic regimes, layered histories, and dynamic divisions of space. She sees painting as an act of recognition and projection, revision, intervention, and representation over time. Hers is both a speculative pictorialism and a metamorphic narrative. Acts of painting that typify changes of temperament—pentimento, overpainting, the subdivision of planes, or lyrical effects of brushwork—might in turn shift the narrative arc, scramble the scenery, or recast the lead characters as extras. A painterly gesture unfolds a garment into a figure, a suggestion of likeness, a silhouette crossing jagged planes in heels, a pattern repopulated as a city, and a dog cohabiting a painterly vortex with a group of women.
Gendel has participated in numerous group shows and solo exhibitions, and reviews of her work have appeared in Modern Painters, Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Art Papers, and Hyperallergic, among others. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Gendel an Academy Award in 2007. She participated in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program in 2010 and was an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in 2005.
[excerpted from Soco Gallery website: www.socogallery.com]