Born in 1945 in Torrington, Connecticut, Neil Jenney has been a defiantly unique voice in contemporary painting for over forty years. He came to prominence in the mid-1970s with the emergence of what curator Marcia Tucker described as “Bad Painting.” Created between 1968 and 1970, Jenney’s "Bad Paintings" were developed in reaction to the minimalist, conceptual, and hyperrealist styles prominent at the time. Jenney’s figurative paintings include only a few elements, pared down to their most essential colors and forms, which are presented in simple cause/effect or action/outcome relationships. In Hunter and Hunted (1969), green is grass and blue is sky. The paint is applied thinly, in broad, brushy marks and scratches. Each composition is encased within the artist’s heavy black wood frames, which he designs and often embellishes with the work’s title in a block-letter caption, creating a relationship between word and image. Jenney’s “Bad Paintings” presented a new and unique style of realism based on ideas rather than mimetic accuracy, and were instrumental in re-establishing figurative painting in America as a serious art form. Jenney continued to expand this type of realism in his later works that have been dubbed as “Good Paintings.” In Day Time (2006), for example, he subtlely contrasts the light of a morning and evening sky with barely perceptible brush strokes.

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Open 3 May - 30 November 2014, on weekends and Wednesdays by appointment.

 

Admission is free.

 

Donations to help support our programming are appreciated, if possible.

 

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For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at + 1 212 256 0057 or info@hallartfoundation.org.

The exhibition runs concurrently with Olafur Eliasson and Georg Baselitz.