Neil Jenney
American, Born 1943
Born in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1943, Neil Jenney briefly attended the Massachusetts College of Art and Design before moving to New York in 1966. His work was abstract and often sculptural until he decided to react against the growing popularity of the minimalists and photorealists by subverting their pristine idealism with paintings that were deliberately awkward. This series of works became known as his “Bad Paintings” after New Museum curator Marcia Tucker included them in a group show of the same name in 1978. A Bad Painting typically depicts two figures or objects engaged in some activity inside a field of smeared brushstrokes. Colors are chosen for their lack of nuance — grass is green, skies are blue —and the titles often reiterate the names of the things his viewers are seeing: “Dog and Shit” 1970, “Girl and Doll” 1969, ‘Birds and Jets,” 1969. Jenney changed his way of working dramatically after the Bad Paintings and began to produce realistic portraits of the natural environment surrounded by heavy, dark frames that he made himself. “I discovered that to the Greeks, a painting was meant to mimic looking through a window onto a scene. So the frame is the architectural foreground that presents the illusion,” he said in 2016. This interest in frames has informed later bodies of his work such as the reframed and edited Picasso reproductions he calls “improved Picassos.” Jenney’s paintings and sculptures have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, with shows at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Hammer Museum, CA; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; Joslyn Art Museum, NE; the National Gallery of Art, D.C.; Museu Serralves, Portugal; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; and Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands. He lives and works in New York.