Jenna Gribbon

11/09/22 • 43 min

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THIS WEEK on the GWA Podcast, we interview one of the most exciting painters working today, Jenna Gribbon. Drawing on the traditions of oil paint by focussing on figuration, Jenna Gribbon is known for her sensual, washy and almost electrically-coloured canvases that predominantly portray her partner, Mackenzie, as well as her son. Working on a surface, which, when witnessed in real life, appears to be constantly moving, the bodies in Jenna’s paintings erupt like landscapes or waterfalls collapsing in on each other. Get up close, and revealed are three, four, five, SIX layers of unexpected colour: light blues, purples, oranges, yellows, hot pinks. Existing in both natural and synthetically-lit source – I am especially drawn to those with electric lights, almost appearing as a spiritualist glow – Jenna’s paintings transport you to places of both intimacy and isolation, such as that moment when you’re with one other person and it feels like you’re the only people in the world. Although we often see the same people crop up, by their very nature the paintings feel universal, like fleeting memories that you want to hold onto forever, and, most significantly, intimate – the latter being a key aspect of her work. Based in Brooklyn, NYC, where we are recording today, Jenna has exhibited across the globe at Fredericks and Freiser in New York, Massimo de Carlo in London, most recently at the Frick Madison which paired her work with Old Master Paintings in the Met Breuer’s former brutalist building. Current exhibitions include at the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, and she is housed in museum collections across the globe. Jenna Gribbon in conversation at the Frick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt1ot3Cy2UY Cultured Magazine: https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2022/02/16/jenna-gribbon-and-her-musician-muse-mackenzie-scott-blend-love-and-paint Interview with Juxtapoz https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/jenna-gribbon-the-pleasure-of-looking/ Interview with Whitehot Magazine: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/dialogue-with-painter-jenna-gribbon/3880 Frieze: https://www.frieze.com/article/five-up-coming-painters-follow Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Research assistant: Viva Ruggi Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/ -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY CHRISTIES: www.christies.com

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Catherine Opie

THIS WEEK on the GWA Podcast, we interview one of the most renowned photographers working in the world right now, Catherine Opie! A photographer of portraits of people, landscapes, the urban environment and American society, Opie uses the tool of the camera to explore sexual and cultural identity. First picking up a camera aged nine, it was in the 1990s that she began to gain recognition for her studio portraits of gay and transgender communities who appear painterly and defiant, powerful and regal. Travelling across the world, and in particular different areas of North America, Opie has documented masculinity through high school footballers; politics and culture through her images of the 2008 presidential election; the landscape through images of sparse urban environments; and memorial through images of house belongings once owned by Elizabeth Taylor. Linked by notions of complexity, community, visibility and empathy, Opie’s photographs tell a story about the society in which we live. Speaking about her work she has said, “From early on, I wanted to create a language that showed how complex the idea of community really is, how we categorize who we are as human beings in relation to places we live.” Born in Ohio, and now based in Los Angeles, where she is a professor of photography and the chair of the UCLA department of art, Opie has exhibited in the world’s most prestigious museums, from MOCA Los Angeles to the Guggenheim in New York, and at the Whitney Biennial and many more. But the reason why we are speaking with Opie today is because this summer she opened a solo show at Thomas Dane Gallery in London – To What We Think We Remember. Taking its title from a Joan Didion quote, this exhibition focuses on community, collective responsibility and how to move forward while faced with the potentially devastating challenges of climate change, and the erasure of personal and political freedoms. -- LINKS: Thomas Dane show: https://www.thomasdanegallery.com/exhibitions/268/ New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/catherine-opie-all-american-subversive New York Times 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/arts/design/catherine-opie-photography-monograph.html Art review: https://artreview.com/catherine-opie/ Opie essay for CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/catherine-opie-beauty/index.html Hilton Als 2021: https://www.regenprojects.com/attachment/en/54522d19cfaf3430698b4568/Press/610b3b9460b7b53c1b733db9 i–D: https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/g5gvk7/catherine-opie-interview-2021-life-in-photos New York Times 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/t-magazine/catherine-opie.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article -- Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Research assistant: Viva Ruggi Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/ -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY CHRISTIES: www.christies.com

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Dorothy Price on Käthe Kollwitz

THIS WEEK on the GWA Podcast, we interview Dr Dorothy Price on one of the most acclaimed artists ever to live, the great German Expressionist, KATHE KOLLWITZ! Dorothy Price is an indefatigable pioneer. Not only has she been instrumental as a specialist in German Expressionism, Weimar Culture and Black British Art, with a specific focus on women artists, but she has authored numerous books and articles in both areas. But today we are meeting because her latest exhibition, Making Modernism, opens at the Royal Academy of Arts, London this month, focussing on a group of women artists all of whom were active in Germany in the first few decades of the twentieth century. The exhibition seeks to look again at histories of modernism through the eyes of its female practitioners and is the first group exhibition of women artists at the Royal Academy for over 20 years: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/making-modernism So today we are going to be discussing one of these artists: Kathe Kollwitz, the pioneering German Expressionist who documented, through a socially conscious lens, the working classes and unemployed, and was a master at capturing the emotive intensity of her subjects, their vulnerabilities and hardship. Primarily a printmaker, Kollwitz took psychological intensity to new heights with her often stark portrayals of the grief-stricken and oppressed. Depicting mothers and children wrenched apart by death; individuals filled with anguish and in mourning; poverty, love, hatred and war ‒ Kollwitz’s compassionate images reveal the grim rawness of reality observed through a deeply sensitive lens. Socially conscious and created with acute feeling (she once wrote, ‘I agree with my art serving a purpose’), her work still speaks truth to the world we live in today. Born in Eastern Prussia, Kollwitz, having witnessed the physical and emotional effects of industrialisation, used printmaking to record the bleakness and inequalities of life. Immediate, accessible and at times cheap, printmaking enables an artist to produce both intricately detailed images and bold graphic forms. Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Research assistant: Viva Ruggi Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/ -- Making Modernism:Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin at the RA: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/making-modernism https://www.kollwitz.de/en/biography https://www.kaethe-kollwitz.berlin/en/kaethe-kollwitz/biography/ https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG34072 Print cycle: A Weaver's Revolt (1892-97): https://www.kollwitz.de/en/cycle-weavers-revolt-overview -- Head of a Child in its Mother's Hands (Study of the Down Trodden) (1900): https://www.germanexpressionismleicester.org/leicesters-collection/artists-and-artworks/kaethe-kollwitz/head-of-a-child-in-its-mothers-hands-(study-of-the-down-trodden)/ https://www.kollwitz.de/en/cycle-peasants-war-overview https://www.kollwitz.de/en/woman-with-dead-child-kn-81 https://www.kollwitz.de/en/pair-of-lovers-sculpture-en-bronze Print cycle: War (completed 1921-1922) https://www.kollwitz.de/en/series-war-overview -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY CHRISTIES: www.christies.com