NEW YORK, NY.- The Alpha Workshops Gallery will present an exhibition of new work by artist Julia Jacquette from October 17th through Nov 7th, 2020. Titled A Very Angry Angel, the exhibition presents oil paintings from a new series that Jacquette has been developing since 2018. This will be the first time that the works are presented to the public.
The Alpha Workshops Gallery in New York City, at 245 West 29th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, will be accessible for small, socially distanced groups of visitors indoors. The exhibition will also be visible through the Gallery’s large picture windows, where passersby on 29th Street are welcomed to view the exhibition from outdoors. The Gallery will be open Thursday through Saturday, 1 to 6pm.
“Two years ago, I began a body of work that includes images of current media figures—both fictional and real—interacting in both violent and comical ways,” explains Jacquette. “The paintings represent an attempt to discuss my own rage at—and fear of—our current situation as residents of the United States. I feel compelled to make images of both my heroes and those I abhor: sometimes those heroes attacking loathsome individuals, other times they're being vanquished themselves.”
The artist continues, “Throughout many bodies of work, my paintings have given me a way to grapple with the relentless presence of media imagery in our lives, and the pernicious narrative that it promotes. That narrative can be one of seduction or one that belittles the viewer or, in the current moment, a spectacle of politicians’ and celebrities’ unbridled self-promotion and the reactions of an anguished population to it. The paintings act as a way for me to ‘own’ these media images which continually fascinate—and also vex—me.” Jacquette’s artwork was featured in a museum retrospective in 2017-2018, titled Unrequited and Acts of Play.
Organized by Tracy L. Adler, the Johnson-Pote Director of the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, the exhibition originated there in 2017, and then traveled to the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, where it was on view in 2018. The exhibition was accompanied by a hardcover monograph, Julia Jacquette: Unrequited and Acts of Play, as well as a large-scale graphic memoir authored and illustrated by Jacquette, titled Playground of My Mind .
Julia Jacquette (b. 1964) is an American artist who divides her time between New York City and Amsterdam. Her work has been shown extensively at galleries and museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The RISD Museum, the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, and the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, among other institutions. Jacquette’s work was included in the first installment of MoMA PS1's "Greater New York" exhibition in 2000, and was the subject of the Opener Series of solo exhibitions by emerging artists at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs in 2004. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Princeton University, and is currently on the faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology (NYC).
