Paul Jenkins in three museum exhibitions

The Redfern Gallery is pleased to announce that Paul Jenkins is currently part of two museum exhibitions in the US, and another in Spain. An important ink on paper, executed in 1954, has been included in By Any Means: Contemporary Drawings from the Morgan, which runs at the Morgan Library & Museum from 18 January to 12 May. This work is among the earliest by Jenkins in evidencing the fluidity of paint so essential to his art. Often overlooked in the body of the artist’s oeuvre with its dominance of radiant colour, the black and white works in Chinese and India ink on paper provide an intimate view both in scale and in scope of this sustaining aspect of his art. In Lure of the Object: Art from the June and Rob Heller Collection, at Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee (8 February 8 – 21 April), a striking work on canvas can be seen; executed in 1980, this period marked the reintroduction of impasto into his paintings. 

 

In Madrid, the Museo Reina Sofia has installed the exhibition Lost, Loose and Loved: Foreign Artists in Paris 1944-1968 (21 November 2018 – 22 April 2019), which features a 1962 watercolour by Paul Jenkins from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Jenkins maintained a lifelong commitment to watercolour, and his body of work in this medium is significant in breadth and scope. In 1983, the artist wrote: “Watercolour is not elusive. It is the architecture beneath the sea that cries to be let out, to be discovered. And when it rings right, it sounds very much like a bell tolling deeply in the sea from some strange sunken chapel.” Jenkins arrived in Paris in 1953, where a year later his first solo exhibition took place at Studio Paul Facchetti, and he continued to divide his time between New York and France throughout his life.