Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Jocelyn Hobbie‘s Beauties the artist’s first solo show in San Francisco, on view through April 20, 2024. The artist presents a series of new oil paintings on canvas and paper portraying introspective women whose bodies evaporate into floral and graphic designs.
Hobbie’s paintings on canvas entangle her alluring figures within intricate, hypnotic arrangements of plant life and cultural geometries. In Peak Desire, a commanding female figure is seen amid a sea of richly rendered yellow tulips, blue plumeria, and multicolor dahlias. Black and red butterflies that flutter among the petals echo hues in the woman’s vest, oscillating between dimensional curves and flat textures. Slipping the portrait between billowing patterns, the contrast between foreground and background collapses. In her own world, the woman’s face projects a gaze that defines the artist’s visual vocabulary, extending her reach beyond the frame.
Hobbie’s paintings reflect her command of art history, engaging the traditions of Art Nouveau and Ukiyo-e, for example, and her dialogue with artists such as William Morris, Gustav Klimt, Tamara Lempicka, and Kehinde Wile. Inventions of her imagination, Hobbie’s hyper-real depictions of women are painted without models. Her patterns are original, albeit inspired by a wide range of tiles, textiles, and other ornamental abstraction.
The exhibition also includes several oil-on-paper paintings. Unlike the dense layering of her canvases, these delicately executed works combine patterns on a flat plane. Like art quilts, they draw from the legacy of 1970s feminist art.
Hobbie places her women into universes of complex harmony, contrasting stillness with movement, exertion with rest. Her dense patterns do not entrap her subjects; rather, the swirl of visual activity shields them from solitude.
