Neil Jenney at Gagosian Park & 75

Gagosian is pleased to present drawings and paintings by Neil Jenney.

A maverick in twentieth century American art, Jenney shifted his focus from abstract painting and sculpture in order to pursue a new type of realism, adopting the binary of “bad” and “good” paintings. He began to make the Bad Paintings in the 1960s, referring to them as such after Marcia Tucker’s exhibition “Bad Painting” at the New Museum in 1978. These purposefully sketchy, gestural works poked at preconceptions of taste and connoisseurship, and, according to Jenney, were “good concepts painted badly.” With them, he sought to indicate narrative truth through the depiction of elementary relationships between people and things. The Good Paintings, ongoing since the 1970s, pursue this same goal, but through an opposite approach. Using oil paint on wood panel, Jenney produces flawless, heavily stylized studies of the North American landscape, each surface so detailed that it seems to surpass reality. And most recently, in the New Good Paintings, he has expanded his scope to include other geographic locations, creating vistas that are as disorienting as they are clear.