Recent Successes of Alum Jenna Gribbon

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to announce the recent accomplishments of Painting alumni Jenna Gribbon. This fall, Gribbon exhibited her work in a solo exhibition at Fredericks and Freiser in New York City. Her work has been featured in ArtNet News and recently garnered the attention of art critic Jerry Saltz.  

The exhibition, titled, “When I Looked at You the Light Changed” presents two series of work and highlights the construction of personal narrative, in which she combines references to art history, photographic documentation, and childhood memory through her paintings. ArtNet News named Jenna Gribbon’s exhibition as a Thing Not to Miss in New York’s Art World. Jerry Saltz in the article, “What the Hell was Modernism” refers to Gribbon as an artist whose work “crosses the beams of modernism with motives on Greek vases”. The exhibition was also mentioned in Artspeak NYC, as well as NY Art Beat, Galleries Now, and Juxtapoz Magazine.

The first series making up the exhibition titled, “Wrestlers” depicts bold images of women wrestling. The other body of work is made up of portraits of her friends and family, that grapples with how personal memories are affected by constantly documenting our lives. The small, intimate and candid paintings contrast with the staged, wrestling paintings.  

The bold documentations of women wrestling are superimposed over locations from her own past, whether be childhood or adolescence. Gribbon mines myriad techniques from European painting, like the dramatic poses and lighting of the Dutch Golden Age, or the hazy landscapes of Impressionism. She includes contemporary touches—visible tan lines, logos, and red Solo cups—and breaks compositional rules, drawing viewers’ eyes to a painting’s corner, or cropping a figure at her feet. Gribbon combines motherhood, humor, sexuality, and the everyday through a dream-like cohesion through both series.  

Gribbon (b. 1978, Knoxville, TN) earned her MFA from Hunter College after attending the University of Georgia and earning her BFA in Drawing and Painting. Following her role as painter and color technician for artist Jeff Koons she was commissioned by Sofia Coppola to contribute three paintings for her film, ‘Marie Antoinette’. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and her most recent exhibitions include “Them” at Perrotin, New York and “Paint, Also Known As Blood: Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw.

Read more about Gribbon’s exhibition here.