Collezione Maramotti presents Mirages, the first solo show in a European art institution by American painter Jenna Gribbon, who has conceived a new group of ten works specifically for our Pattern Room.
Gribbon often depicts the people closest to her: her friends, her son, her partner, her fellow artists. Her paintings capture the intricacies and dynamics within these relationships while addressing the implications surrounding seeing and being seen. The viewer shares the artist’s point of view in the scenes, encouraged to explore the relationships both within the canvas, between subject and artist, and beyond it, as partners, family or friends. The intimacy and feeling within these relationships are absorbed into the gesture and painterly language used by the artist to depict them.
The central subject of the works in the exhibition is the artist’s partner, musician Mackenzie Scott (aka TORRES). Gribbon’s protagonist is portrayed in vivid colors and fluid, sensual brushstrokes that make the surroundings almost merge with her body – a body that is reflected, moulded, perused, made larger than life – experimenting with scale and compositions that are entirely new for the artist.
While in the larger paintings the visual energy of these images radiates from a distance – their forms becoming almost abstract as one approaches the surface of the canvas – the smaller works demand proximity, a personal movement towards and into the work in order to grasp its details and narrative.
Gribbon’s figurative paintings draw inspiration from personal memories, art history and everyday experience, fluidly combining different styles in each piece. Working from photos she has taken with her phone as a way of “capturing ideas”, the artist creates scenes and portraits that have a cinematic feel, hovering between reality, fiction and imagination.
