Jenna Gribbon & Avant Arte
New collaboration coming soon
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“A common misunderstanding is that my work is about intimacy. It's just as much about a sort of constructed intimacy or consuming what we think of as other people's intimate moments, which maybe aren't intimate at all.”
The pleasure and politics of looking
Jenna Gribbon challenges how we look at portraits of women. Her bright, enigmatic portraits show powerful naked women. Instead of 'acting pretty', they do everyday things. Some play guitar, eat food, or look directly at the viewer. Others have close-up limbs, faces, and body parts that dominate the painting. Gribbon’s process is collaborative. She begins with a photograph that she takes herself. Then, she uses friends and family to pose for her as muses. In broad, confident brushstrokes she captures them in powerful stances with oil paint. Her process also involves looking at images online – a...
Jenna Gribbon challenges how we look at portraits of women. Her bright, enigmatic portraits show powerful naked women. Instead of 'acting pretty', they do everyday things. Some play guitar, eat food, or look directly at the viewer. Others have close-up limbs, faces, and body parts that dominate the painting. Gribbon’s process is collaborative. She begins with a photograph that she takes herself. Then, she uses friends and family to pose for her as muses. In broad, confident brushstrokes she captures them in powerful stances with oil paint. Her process also involves looking at images online – a world that is saturated and lacking in privacy.
Gribbon is fascinated by the act of looking. Even though they might look like it, her paintings are not about intimacy – they’re about voyeurism. She wants to “jar people out of what they think they already know about consuming images of naked women.” In her work, she challenges her male predecessors like Lucien Freud. She mimics their style as a tongue-in-cheek comment on gender. She challenges male-dominated art history and how we view the female nude today. Gribbon offers a radical alternative that is completed on its own – asking not just how we look but why.
Bio
Jenna Gribbon (she/her) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1978. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Early life
Gribbon was fascinated with art from an early age. Since art education at her school was very limited, she fell in love with it through books and on television.
In their words
Gribbon’s paintings are about pleasure and voyeurism. She is, “interested in what it means to see and be seen in a time where there is more imagery of both than ever before.”
