Jackie Gendel: Sidelong Glances
Inman Gallery, Houston
March 9 – April 29, 2023
Study for tbt, 2019
Ink, gouache, flashe, watercolor, faux gold leaf on paper
9 3/4 x 8 1/8 in (24.8 x 20.6 cm)
tbt, 2023
Watercolor and gouache on handmade paper
10 3/8 x 11 3/8 in (26.4 x 28.9 cm)
14 3/8 x 15 3/8 x 1 1/4 in (36.5 x 39.1 x 3.2 cm) framed
Inman Gallery presents Sidelong Glances, a solo exhibition of works on paper made by JACKIE GENDEL across the span of the last decade, from 2014 to 2023.
Jackie Gendel paints colorful, narrative compositions that blur the distinction between figuration and abstraction in their rendering of people and cinematic spaces. Figures – women in particular – take center stage in Jackie Gendel’s work, unfolding within dynamic scenes with moving bodies in changing spaces. Embracing a fluid approach to her work, Jackie Gendel has commented how she develops “scenes, characters and situations through deliberate figuration, intuitive mark making, color and chance procedures,” often painting over works, or creating the same image in different colors and sizes to subvert the singular image. This procedural evolution mirrors the evolving identities of the characters she paints, allowing a narrative to continue without a predetermined or fixed destination. In doing so, Jackie Gendel’s practice quite literally creates a moving image, which skillfully parallels the theatrical, even cinematic, nature of the paintings themselves.
Included in the show are a series of works on paper across nearly a decade of making, from 2014-2023. Within this selection we see Jackie Gendel working in a range of styles and scales, with color and shape varying widely. Yet this also gives us a unique opportunity to see the cyclical nature of her work, the ways she moves in and out of motifs, circling back to compositional strategies with renewed vigor and sustained curiosity. Such display pushes back on reductive understandings of stylistic evolution as linear progress, instead showing a nuanced, playful, expansive understanding of experimentation and generative creation with an eye for sequence and seriality.
Jackie Gendel’s compositions, like her painterly process, are highly attuned to the slippery relationship between space, time, and motion. Embracing experimentation and loss of control, her works show the ways marks can subtly and dramatically shift unfolding narratives and morph into expressive characters. “In this way,” Jackie Gendel writes, “painting and drawing introduce me to my subject.”
Not only do we have a sense of Jackie Gendel introducing herself – and by extension, the viewer – to her subjects, but so too do we feel the figures introducing themselves to one another. Rarely alone, these figures exist alongside others, their relationships captured in varying gestures and glimpses, alluding to dynamics we are not wholly privy to. Sidelong glances between the women are scattered throughout the exhibition, both within paintings and across tableaux. The women rarely look back at us, choosing instead to concern themselves with their own narratives, their own worlds, and each other. In this way, the paintings have a life of their own; the sidelong glance quietly subverts the gaze and honors the figures’ own agency.
JACKIE GENDEL (b. 1973, Houston, TX) received a BA from Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO) and an MFA from Yale University (New Haven, CT). She has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, and her work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Modern Painter, and Art Papers. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Jackie Gendel an Academy Award in 2007. She is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Jackie Gendel lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.
INMAN GALLERY
3901 Main Street, Houston, TX 77002
