“Some of these works I have not laid eyes on in over 7 years,” NYC-based painter and former Juxtapoz cover artist, Jenny Morgan, says, a few weeks before the opening of her first museum retrospective, Skindeep at the MCA Denver. “I'm excited to see these pieces again—revisiting work can feel like seeing an old friend, familiar, but also strangely different. The passage of time allows for perspective and deeper understanding of who I am as an artist and the voice I'm creating.” The exhibition runs through August 27, 2017.
For nearly a decade now, Jenny Morgan has been one of the more fascinating and adventurous figurative painters in the US; photoreal with abstraction, often self-portraiture that appear as honest documentations that captures what Morgan calls her “deep curiosity with the human spirit.” The self-portrait paintings in Skindeep brings up an interesting contemplation for the artist, how she reacts to some of these personal works of herself that she has not seen in years. “Since I work with people in my life as muses, often I am reacquainted with individuals from my past who exist frozen in time. Being confronted with previous self-portraits can be the most challenging- I am able to re-live who I was in that moment.” The show will be broken up into 3 parts: works from 2007-2009, a section dedicated to the “spiritual” aspects of Morgan’s work, and a counterpoint to the rest of the works with a section dedicated to her paintings of celebrities. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new 52-page catalogue published by the museum. —Evan Pricco
