NEIL JENNEY – BAD PAINTINGS: Tobias Mueller Modern Art, Zurich, Switzerland

 

This solo exhibition showcases ten paintings from the artist’s self-procaimed Bad Years period 1969-1972, during which time he created the most celebrated and institutionally recognized output. The works are evocative of Jenney’s bold and expressionist response to Minimalism, Fotorealism and Pop Art. The term comes from Marcia Tucker’s 1978 curation of a group exhibition entitled Bad Painting at the New Contemporary Museum of Art, New York, a show of so-called “bad” paintings and drawings by fourteen artists who rejected the traditional concepts of draftsmanship in favor of personal styles of figuration, which included the work of Jenney and his contemporaries. Tucker meant her title to be ironic: the work was not actually “bad”, but rather defiant. Opposed to intricate and finished surfaces, this body of work was iconoclastic in its boldly nonchalant approach to representation and its interrogation of prevailing norms of skills, technique and finish. When first shown in the late seventies, these early paintings were read as self-consciously clever deconstructions of painting as painting, and painting as cultural artifact.