SEPTEMBER 5 – 8, 2024
Booth P22 | Javits Center

SOCO Gallery will present a solo booth of oil paintings by artist Jackie Gendel in the Presents Section of the Armory Show at the Javits Center in New York, NY from September 5 - 8, 2024 in booth P22. This will be the artist’s first presentation at the Armory Show and the gallery’s debut in the Presents Section of the fair. 

Artist Jackie Gendel’s subjects surface from the contradictions of past aesthetic regimes, layered as speculative histories and dramatizations of her figuration, severing the lines between self, scene, figure and architecture as they narratively emerge from modernist divisions of space. As a painter, Gendel views her medium as an act of recognition and projection, revision, intervention, and shifting representation over time.

In a solo presentation of Gendel’s work, neo-modernist motifs will be explored and presented in new large and tiny paintings. In this unique installation, the artist will create a “city of women” built by both individual paintings as much as by their abstracted narratives (and narratives about abstraction). By constructing a fiction between fragmented figure and crowd, women become architecture and automatons, unfolding a figuration of constructivist bodies of unfixed age, time, location and gender.

The paintings will encompass themes of street scenes typical of Vorticist, Orphist, Futurist and Expressionist subjects of city life: stepping out onto the street, excitement, glamor, loneliness, camaraderie, and wall flowering. These subjects evoke the perennially social fantasies of connectedness and autonomy despite their attendant machinations and stylistic violence. Interiors and domestic scenes (inside and outside, windows) and ideas of the decorative attend to the pleasures of visual objectification inherent in "being seen." In Gendel’s “city,” half-step-patterns will indicate stairwells and spiral cases, ladders, lifts, and escalators that traverse her canvases.

The painting, The Architect’s Daughters IV, shows female figures’ faces clearly seen while their bodies are cloaked in various shapes, becoming other objects altogether-- lost in the crowd. Gendel’s clever use of color and form dominate the composition and allow her subjects to both be seen and vanish into the camouflage of others, or adjacent spaces.

Jackie Gendel (B. 1973)

Jackie Gendel (b. 1973, Houston, TX) received her BFA from Washington University, St. Louis in 1996 and her MFA from Yale University in 1998. Since 2000, Gendel has participated in numerous group shows and solo exhibitions including Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024), Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2023), SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC (2023, 2020, 2017), Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021), Thomas Erben, New York, NY (2019, 2016), Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY (2018), Jeff Bailey, New York, NY (2013, 2012, 2010, 2006), and Loyal Gallery, Malmö, Sweden (2012). Reviews of her work have appeared in Modern Painters, Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Art Papers, and Hyperallergic, among others. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Gendel an Academy Award in 2007. She is currently the Graduate Program Director and an Associate Professor of Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.