Jennifer Packer

5 Dec 2020-14 Mar 2021

Overview

This survey exhibition, the artist’s first in a European institution, will include paintings and drawings from the past decade alongside recent work. New York-based Jennifer Packer is known for painting intimate portraits of friends and family members and flower still lifes. Working from a combination of observation, improvisation and memory, Packer’s paintings and large-scale drawings reveal an emotional and physical fragility of life. Characterised by a vibrant approach to colour and a powerful play of scale, she layers, reveals and obscures her subjects through constant shifts between grounds, dissolving figuration into near abstraction. Packer transforms the art historical traditions of portraiture and still life within a contemporary context and urgency. On occasion, she describes her flower compositions as funerary bouquets and vessels of personal grief; these paintings about loss are often made in response to tragedies of state and institutional violence against Black Americans. While the casual repose of her portraits is the result of her care for the sitters, Packer acknowledges her choice to paint figures as political, stating: ‘Representation and particularly, observation from life, are ways of bearing witness and sharing testimony’.