Jenna Gribbon was born in 1978 in Knoxville, USA, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Hunter College. Gribbon’s paintings of nudes pay homage to the moment when light touches skin. Her lush brush strokes capture her friends, son and girlfriend in intimate portraits. Her work carefully examines the implications and responsibilities of looking through what she calls a ‘scopophilic feedback loop’. Thereby, the titles provide a key for a complete understanding of her works. As she rarely finishes a canvas within one sitting, Gribbon often builds her work on the basis of photographs as a means of how we memorise and experience. Gribbon’s paintings of those closest to her vividly capture instants of pure joie de vivre. Her work has been exhibited widely in the USA, Germany, UK, South Korea, Norway, Finland and Switzerland.
Flowers smudge the foliage in [Jennifer] Packer’s still lifes, the small canvases filled with greenery and darkness and sobriety. The titles of these flower paintings tell us that they are more than nature studies. Say Her Name is a funerary bouquet for Sandra Bland, found hanged in her cell in a Texas jail while in police custody in 2015. Packer’s flower paintings are memento mori for the named and the unnamed, and punctuate all the figures, portraits and rooms in her Serpentine Gallery show.
I remember reading that the young Balthus was deeply influenced by Derain’s remark, “The only purpose of painting today is the recovery of lost secrets.” That observation was made almost a hundred years ago now, but it still resonates with me.
A painting is an intensely personal vision. It is intuitive and its meaning can be elusive—sometimes even to the painter. Each painting is a piece of something that you can spend a lifetime trying to figure out. It’s a revelation of the unseen, the hidden. And sometimes a painting is as much about what isn’t seen as what is.
My work is about relationships, and about separateness. But fundamentally the paintings are about the self. I'm interested in that place of tension between the containment and the expression of feeling, and in how to portray that visually.
My paintings depict individual men, but they aren't portraits. The men inhabit a particular place, but it isn't real. It's an interior territory, where things are and are not what they seem. The paintings are like stages, and the men who inhabit them are the actors. The reality lies in the emotional core of this world, intensely felt but highly contained. My model Lorenzo called it "emotional purgatory.”
They're a group of anonymous men, but they’re also in some way self-portraits. And perhaps these are worlds of their own making—worlds with edges, and outsides, and unknown terrains beyond, just out of reach. This is the region where desire and doubt, longing and reticence, intimacy and uncertainty coexist. It speaks of absence as much as presence.
The Colony Room I, 1962 - Michael Andrews’s painting of one of 50s and 60s Soho’s most storied drinking dens, the Colony Room, is a who’s who of the art scene. That hot pink collar belongs to Francis Bacon. Artists’ model Henrietta Moraes is centre-stage. A chiselled Lucian Freud looks us straight in the eye. At the bar, Muriel Belcher, the club’s proprietor, strikes a pose.
Melanie and Me Swimming (1978–9)
Michael Andrews RA (30 October 1928 – 19 July 1995) was a British painter. Michael Andrews played a deaf-mute in Lorenza Mazzetti's Free Cinema film Together, alongside Eduardo Paolozzi (1955). Lorenza Mazzetti (26 July 1927 – 4 January 2020) was an Italian film director, novelist, photographer and painter. In the 2020 novel, Summer by writer Ali Smith, Mazzetti plays a cameo, but significant role. Her life story, as well as reference to her early films, are included.
January 19, 2017 - Narrated by exhibition curator and friend of the artist, Richard Calvocoressi, "Michael Andrews Elusive Painter" introduces the artist and his work, unknown to many, and reveals the curatorial vision behind "Earth Air Water," on view at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London through March 25, 2017. This documentary, accompanied by unseen archival material, as well as footage of the only existing filmed documentation of Andrews, is a biographical overview of the late British painter.
La Femme Damnée - Nicolas François Octave Tassaert, 1859
Nicolas François Octave Tassaert (Paris, 26 July 1800 – Paris, 24 April 1874) was a French painter of portraits and genre, religious, historical and allegorical paintings, as well as a lithographer and engraver. He was the grandson of the sculptor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert.
Mats Gustafson (Swedish, b. 1951) began his career as an illustrator in the late 1970s, a time when editorial illustration was eclipsed by photography, and watercolor as a conceptual medium had barely been explored. A graduate of Dramatiska Institutet (University College of Film, Radio, Television and Theatre) in Stockholm, he first applied his graphic sensibility to the art of stage design. This experience translated into illustration when he began publishing his work in eminent international fashion publications. The elegant and subtly expressive character of Gustafson's watercolor, pastel and cut-out paperworks expanded the possibilities of fashion illustration and nearly single-handedly reinvigorated the genre.
Gustafson's fashion and portrait illustrations have been included in editorial publications such as French and Italian Vogue, The New Yorker, and Visionaire, and he has created advertising art for Hermès, Tiffany & Co., Yohji Yamamoto, and Comme des Garçons. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows. Gustafson lives in New York.
Valentin Serov - Portrait of Nikolay Pozniakov (1908)
Valentin Alexandrovich Serov (Russian: Валенти́н Алекса́ндрович Серо́в; 19 January 1865 – 5 December 1911) was a Russianpainter, and one of the premier portrait artists of his era.
Andy Warhol always wanted to publish his highly homoerotic 1950s drawings portraying mainly nude young men kissing, posing or engaging in sexual acts such as fellatio. The Pop art pioneer showed a selection of these taboo-busting works—primarily rendered in ink on paper—at New York’s Bodley Gallery in 1956 (Studies For [sic] a Boy Book) but never realised his ambition to publish the drawings in a monograph.
According to a statement from the publisher Taschen, Warhol “mistakenly saw these illustrations as his way of breaking into the New York art scene, underestimating the pervading homophobia of the time [in the mid 1950s]”. Now, more than half a century later, Taschen has has brought together more than 300 of the sexually charged works—selected by the New York-based Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts—in a lavish new book Andy Warhol, Love, Sex and Desire, Drawings 1950-1962. The book has been made in a numbered limited edition of 7,500 and includes essays also by Warhol’s biographer Blake Gopnik and the art critic Drew Zeiba.
