Jenna Gribbon

Jenna Gribbon lives and works in New York City. Her paintings are impressions based on her everyday interactions: conversations, meetings, or intimate situations shared with other women. The leitmotiv, which the artist develops in her subsequent works, is the problem of seeing. The history of painting is a history of objectification of women in the male gaze of artists and viewers. Gribbon paints beautiful, naked, or half-naked bodies of her friends, lovers, and sometimes herself. At first encounter, these scenes evoke associations with the idyllic painting from the Romanticism era or the later Impressionism. Gribbon skilfully juggles different painting styles: from Guercino, through Jan van Eyck, John Singer Sargent, Manet to camp frivolity. In this way she undermines the legitimacy of the male gaze. The women in Gribbon's paintings, immersed the celebration of their own carnality, seem indifferent to our gaze. They do not personify virtues, and they are not decorative elements of decoration — instead, they pose a question about the right and access to their intimacy through.