Details:
① Artwork:
Heads in the Weeds
In this colored pencil drawing, a garish group of human heads lurking within tall weeds populate a colorful forest.
Jennifer Coates’ paintings and drawings depict ghostlike figures, animals, and insects within abstracted landscapes born out of direct observation at specific locations, art historical research, and painterly improvisation. In these hallucinatory worlds, light effects get amplified, and colors get intensified via synthetic and fluorescent pigments.
Specs:
③ Artist:
In Jennifer Coates’ paintings, figures, animals, and insects appear like ghosts within abstracted landscapes that are a hybrid of direct observation at specific locations, art historical research, and painterly improvisation. She has also added a new motif to her compositions: simple structures containing dark portals based on images of abandoned World War II bunkers in the forests of Europe. Coates’ artworks are inspired by 17th-century Dutch Symbolist painting (a baroque genre of forest floor still lifes) as well as ancient Roman garden frescoes. Containing a variety of marks she slowly accumulates in layers, Coates' oeuvre forms a flickering but cohesive whole. In these hallucinatory worlds, light effects get amplified, and colors are intensified via synthetic and fluorescent pigments.
Jennifer Coates was born in 1973 in Surrey, England, and works and lives between Brooklyn, NY, and Lakewood, PA. She received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City, NY (2001) and her BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA (1995).
She has mounted solo exhibitions at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY (2022); Lesser Gods of Lakewood, PA, High Noon Gallery in New York City, NY (2021); Knauer Gallery at West Chester University in West Chester, PA (2021), among others.
Coates has participated in group shows such as And So Did Pleasure Take the Hand of Sorrow and They Wandered Through the Land of Joy at the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, ME (2023); Unnatural Nature: Post Pop Landscapes at Acquavella Galleries in New York City, NY and Palm Beach, FL (2022); Psychedelic Landscape at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York City, NY; Preternatural at Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, GA (2020); and Painting the Narrative at the National Arts Club in New York City, NY (2020).
She won the John Koch Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2021), a NYFA Award in painting (2021), a Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2019), and a Sharpe Walentas Studio residency (2019-18).
Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic (2021), BOMB Magazine (2020), The Brooklyn Rail (2018), Art Critical (2018), The Huffington Post (2017), The New York Times (2011), and Art News (2008), among other publications.