JANUARY 11 – MARCH 1, 2023

Opening Reception with the Artist
Wednesday, January 11, 6 – 8 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Women and Dog, a solo exhibition by artist Jackie Gendel. The gallery will host a public opening on January 11, 2023 from 6 - 8 PM. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery.

Women and Dog is a continuation of Gendel’s work, presenting new paintings on canvas and linen.  Gendel creates a narrative between fragmented figures and settings of an unfixed age, time, location and gender. The artist plays with relationships between characters and forms, pattern and rich color.

Pulling from a number of art historical and cultural sources, including, but not limited to, Art Deco, German Expressionism, Orphism, Futurism, Constructivism and nonobjective painting, the artist also looks towards  early 20th century theater, fashion and textile designs. 

Gendel’s subjects flow from the contradictions of past social and aesthetic regimes, layered histories and dynamic divisions of space. She sees painting as an act of recognition and projection, revision, intervention, and representation

over time. Hers is both a speculative pictorialism and a metamorphic narrative. Acts of painting that typify changes of temperament – pentimento, overpainting, the subdivision of planes, or lyrical effects of brushwork — might in turn shift the narrative arc, scramble the scenery or recast the lead characters as extras. A painterly gesture unfolds a garment into a figure, a suggestion of likeness, a silhouette crossing jagged planes in heels, a pattern repopulated as a city, and a dog cohabiting a painterly vortex with a group of women. 

For Gendel, the usual problems of painting — its historicity, anachronisms, and slippery materiality — offer a larger period-play with the role of painter unfolding in the present.

Jackie Gendel (Origin, B. 1973)

Jackie Gendel (b. 1973, Houston, TX) received her BA from Washington University, St. Louis in 1996 and her MFA from Yale University in 1998. Since 2000, she has participated in numerous group shows and solo exhibitions including Thomas Erben, (2016), Jeff Bailey, New York (2013, 2012, 2010, 2006), Loyal Gallery, Malmö (2012), Moti Hasson, New York (2008), and Mixture Contemporary Art, Houston (2004, 2002). 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 participated in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program in 2010, and was an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in 2005. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.