|
McMurtrey Gallery is pleased to present new work by Robert Jessup. This is his fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Robert Jessup's most recent body of work depicts several themes including Couples in Love, Still Lifes and Interiors, and his distinctive Story Paintings, which Mr. Jessup describes as his most ambitious.
"The settings of these pictures are almost always out in the world, with large landscape vistas providing vital backdrops. Where the couples paintings deal with the interactions of characters with each other, the story paintings deal with the relationship of the characters and the world. Symbolic objects and surrogates abound, meanings are often mysterious and the allegories seem palpable but elusive. I can never say exactly what a picture of mine means because I never start a picture with a precise meaning in mind, and I usually prefer to settle on images that resonate with possible meanings. Ambiguity is something I actively seek. Hopefully, like dreams, my pictures mean many things, with many different levels of meaning".
 |
|
His present style of "Fictional Realism," as he terms it, is influenced by the smooth surface and pictorial inventions of Renaissance and Baroque painting unlike his work previous to 2003, which was stylized and derivative of Cubism and Impressionism. Abandoning elements of the "signature style" of his earlier paintings, most notably their heavily impastoed surfaces, has allowed Mr. Jessup to describe the people he envisions with "greater specificity and individuality." His enthusiasm for the new style is evident in this work. The figures are more alive, more real, than ever before, even if they are purely imagined.
Mr. Jessup's paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the New Orleans Museum of Contemporary Art; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; as well as many public, private, and corporate collections.
|
|
 Robert Jessup 2007 Bio
|
