Jane Irish @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation' Exhibition

Jane Irish 

An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia 

October 3 – November 15, 2025 

Jane Irish 

Archimedean Spiral, 2024

Oil on linen with clear gesso ground, 56 x 50 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Jane Irish (b. 1955). This marks the artist’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Excavating traumas of war and colonialism and embedding these histories into elaborate architectural settings, Irish’s disorienting scenes are layered with multiple visual narratives. Of this new body of work, the artist says:

“Painting representationally or figuratively can be an act of imagination, but entails a code of truth, especially of the interior… The depictions of colonialism and the luxury items in French chateaus, which are often my subject matters, have an overt or covert connection to world systems of exploitation, including especially French involvement in Indochina...I try to exploit a certain doubleness: a harsh critique coexisting with the optimism of political prefiguration.”

Foregrounded by prefigurative politics—an activist approach to ideating a future society—her work analyzes the roots of Western painting and exposes its violent remnants. Within the title, “An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation”, she reinterprets the concept of symbiosis drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s epic poem Eureka. Focusing on a reciprocal adaptation of ideas and mediums, Irish understands how these relations produce a “prefiguration of peace.” Her persistent interest in the cultural memory of the American War in Vietnam reappears in these new works, including references to the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW), which the artist has worked with for decades. 

Jane Irish 

Return, 2025 

Oil on linen with clear gesso ground, 55 x 64 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery

In a large painting on bamboo paper titled Our Testimony (2025), she embosses the VVAW preamble from a 1971 U.S. Congressional record atop an ornately decorated living room. In another painting titled Agent Orange (2025), Jane Irish calls to mind the pollutant used in herbicidal warfare programs with a muddy, darkened palette, while mutating, floating apparitions haunt the room and her 2021 painting Phosphorous hangs on the wall. Of the painting, Jane Irish says,  “I emphasize the violence in the room’s decor. With a breaking heart I ask, ‘Why wouldn’t we repeat and preserve the abuse and killing since we idolize our lives around these acts?’”

Meta references continue in Return (2025), where she transforms her series of colonial scenes titled Decay Puits Sauvage (2025) into a phantasmic wallpaper. Paintings of the decaying wall are shown alongside the semi-fictionalized setting in Return, signaling a spiral of meaning and “coevolution.” Juxtaposing images of colonial violence with the indigenous Vietnamese cloud flooring, Irish’s room becomes both contemplative and confrontational.

Also on view is a large-scale study for Irish’s Renaissance-style ceiling painting titled Cosmos Beyond Atrocity (2024), which was commissioned for the new building of the Princeton University Art Museum. Mounting the study as a wallpaper and hanging the drawings in front, the installation presents Irish’s adaptive process to illuminate the layered temporalities and spatial collisions.

Artist Jane Irish

Jane Irish (b. 1955) received her MFA in 1980 from Queens College, CUNY. She got her start as an artist in the East Village in the 1980s and moved to Philadelphia in 1982. 

She has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. 

She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Artist Grant (2025), a BAU Institute Arts Residency Award from the Camargo Foundation (2025), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2024), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2011), a Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2009), a Painting Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts (1984), and a Painting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982). 

Her work is held in public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Jane Irish @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Jane Irish

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

February 23 - March 27, 2021

JANE IRISH

Supplicant, 2020

Distemper and oil on collaged linen and muslin

78 x 56 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

JANE IRISH

Finial Gold Star Mothers, 2020

Low fire whiteware, china paint, lustre, and underglaze

7 x 7 x 20 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Locks Gallery presents an exhibition of recent paintings and ceramics by Philadelphia-based artist JANE IRISH (b. 1955).

A prolific and self-described ‘history painter,’ Jane Irish creates confrontations and coexistences in her art between realms of history that rarely collide. In an artist statement she writes, “I think of myself as a sort of international regionalist, finding the history of Philadelphia, and then letting that history lead me around the world.” This approach was perhaps most embodied in Jane Irish’s epic 2018 installation at the historic Lemon Hill Mansion in Philadelphia (organized by Philadelphia Contemporary). For the project, she created a series of paintings based on the idea of ‘antipodes’—defined as hemispheric opposites referencing two points on the globe—and transformed two floors of the mansion into an immersive painted exploration of transhistorical space. Visual references in these paintings include the triangle trade of Henry Pratt, the 18th-century owner of the house; Poe’s writings in Philadelphia (Conchologist’s First Book, Barnaby Rudge, Pym narrative, etc.); 16th-century trade routes of Egypt and Vietnam; and paintings of the 1836 “Wilkes Expedition,” among others. The second floor of the space included imagery from the first national protest of Vietnam Veterans Against the War on Labor Day Weekend 1970, which began in Morristown, NJ, and ended at Valley Forge Park, steps from the Lemon Hill Mansion. Paintings from this series are on view along with a selection of new works from 2019 and 2020.

Central to the exhibition is a series of new ‘tapestry paintings’ made of oil and distemper on hand-stitched linen and muslin. In these works, Jane Irish uses two paint mediums and two types of fabric to create a hybrid picture plane that reflects her desire to construct and interweave multiple histories within a single painting. In the foreground, iconographical figures drawn from old masters paintings appear to float in milky ether across the surface of a traditional-looking pastoral setting. The narratives reference mythical and violent imagery from art history as well as moments of witnessing, prayer and mourning. Additionally, each tapestry corresponds to testimony from the Winter Soldier Investigations of 1971, organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)—the archives of which Irish has collected and re-typed word for word in a performative act priming her painting process. An accompanying catalog with an essay by poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein explores Jane Irish’s use of source material in her imagery. 

Though not always clearly visible, the lineage of anti-war protest that began with VVAW is a central theme and subtext of much of Jane Irish’s work, which explores ways an artist can embody resistance through the act of image-making. Janes Irish says, “The overall intent of my work is to develop a visual myth and a visual truth about the build-up and aftermath of the Vietnam War and movements of resistance to it.” She calls this a form of “commemorating heroic resistance” and it reflects her longstanding engagement with Vietnam War protest movements, which were seminal to her youth in the 1970s.

Additional works on view include new paintings based on sketches Jane Irish made on-site at the Prado and El Pardo royal hunting lodge in Madrid. In 2019 Jane Irish traveled to Spain, where she made numerous drawings in the former residences of Spanish kings and Francisco Franco, where Goya tapestries are hung in the interiors. A continuation of her ongoing practice of visiting and recording the domiciles of old world rulers, these paintings are not straight realistic depictions of the opulent interiors but fervent and energetic renderings of the artist’s experience of the space. “Painting an interior, seemingly from life, or beginning from life, is only a cue. To me what follows is an act of truth. . . I paint in a view of it which tells the viewer the record is made by an emotive human being—corporeal artist, motif, and viewer in a single project of transforming or re-aligning the political act of seeing.”

Lastly, the exhibition features new ceramic ‘finial’ sculptures for which Jane Irish appropriates the 19th-century architectural form as a means of depicting interiors in the round on the exterior of the objects. Additional ceramics include vessels shaped like ships which are based on historical potpourri holders produced by Sèvres in the late 1750s and early 1760s. These vessels are loaded with narratives and motifs from the period and beyond. As in her paintings, she says, “My work constitutes a reflection on paradoxes of decoration and political order. . . One can be oblivious to what is contained in the wallpaper or on a vase, but one does so in unrealistic detachment from the world. It is all right there is front of us, but not easy to see.”

The gallery is open by appointment only.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com