CHICAGO, IL.- PATRON is presenting Nocturnes, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with artist Jennie C. Jones, on view June 4 through July 16, 2022. The show, which includes seven paintings (two of which are diptychs) and three works on paper (included two triptychs), presents a new body of work that extends key tenets from her recent solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim. Nocturnes is a term Jones employs both to refer to a music composition evocative of night (a notable example being Felix Mendelssohn’s Nocturne from A Midsummer Night's Dream (1848)), as well as to the history of painting depicting landscapes at night, such as J.M.W Turner, Fishermen at Sea (1796), or Edwin Landseer, Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Bottom (1851).
Jones’ approach to painting combines the historic and aesthetic expressions of Minimalism and abstraction. Materials such as acoustic panels and architectural felt point to the capacity for painting to create aural environments. She layers and melds these materials often used for sound proofing recording studios and constructing instruments to not only become signifiers for sound, but also actively engage with and challenge the viewer. She asks them not only to look at a painting, but to listen to it. On approaching these works, even one’s breath as they near the surface of the composition becomes dampened, muted. Each swath of fiber operates like a confident brushstroke. She pares down color palettes to nearly monochromatic fields of seductive grays, moody blacks, subtly off-white tones replete with quiet pinks and taupe lavenders, and at times mercurial reds. Sharing a deep kinship with the formal “economy of means” imbued by the work of Agnes Martin, Jones’ work keys into the sentiment “the value of art is in the observer.” The restraint offered by minimalist conventions allows the work to become a mirror of self-perception.
Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) lives and works in Hudson, NY. Jones received an MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts in 1996, and a BA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991. She is a Bard College MFA faculty member and a critic at Yale School of Art.
Select solo exhibitions include Dynamics (2022), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Jennie C. Jones: New Compositions (2021), Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY; Constant Structure (2020), The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Jennie C. Jones: RPM (revolutions per minute) (2018), The Phillip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, CT; and Compilation (2015), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX. Select group exhibitions include P5: Yesterday we said tomorrow (2021), Prospect 5, New Orleans, LA; Ways of Seeing Abstraction (2021), Deutsche Bank Collection, Berlin, Germany; Ground/work (2020), The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA; Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition (2020), The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; The Shape of Shape (2019), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; OR BOTH (2019), Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA; Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art (2019), Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Double Edged: Geometric Abstraction Then and Now (2019), Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection (2019), Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago IL; and Out of Easy Reach (2018) DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL and Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University Bloomington, IN.
Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Pérez Art Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Walker Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and several others. She is also represented by Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY.
