North America Divided

Neil Jenney

Balancing idealism and realism, Jenney’s landscape paintings are highly stylised and rendered with a careful attention to detail. Begun in 1971, the Good Paintings are differentiated from Jenney’s previous body of work, which he designated as Bad Paintings (1969–70) after curator Marcia Tucker’s 1978 New Museum exhibition “Bad” Painting, which included his work. Painted in acrylic in a loose, gestural style, the Bad Paintings represent relationships between people and things, while upending preconceptions of connoisseurship and “good taste.” The Good Paintings are instead exacting studies of nature in oil paint on wooden panels.

Jenney’s Good Paintings impart the experience of observing the North American landscape at close range, in contrast with the expansive vistas of untamed wilderness typical of the historical Hudson River School. While describing the natural world, many of the works also remind us that the environment is never far removed from human intervention. Jenney’s handmade black wooden frames are integral to these works, which he regards as “painted sculpture.” Playing off the classical conception of a painting as a window into fictive space, the frames create an architectural foreground, asserting their status as physical objects. The works’ mediated nature is further emphasised by the inclusion of titles stencilled in uppercase serif lettering.

In the Good Paintings, “good” is both a formal and a conceptual label as seen through Jenney’s refined use of paint and color, and his approach to themes of universal significance, such as the artist’s cultural role, climate change, and notions of societal progress. Stretching over nine feet wide in a narrow horizontal format, North America Divided (1990–92) pictures a tree trunk and bands of cirrus clouds together with a worn wooden fence and a long strand of barbed wire. Related paintings feature divisions within the landscape, with fence posts, paths, stone walls, and other constructions demarcating space.

With a sense of subjectivity that verges on the mythological, the Good Paintings convey the coexistence of their subjects in both the real and the imagined world.

Jenney N Divided A
2 images
Artist
Neil Jenney (b.1945)
Title
North America Divided
Medium
Oil on wood, in artist's frame
Date
1990-92
Size
25 ½ x 113 in : 64.8 x 287.0 cm
Inscriptions
Signed and dated "1990-1992" verso
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist in June 1995
Emily Fisher Landau, New York
Sotheby's, their sale, Emily Fisher Landau: An Era Defined - Contemporary Curated, 1st March 2024, Lot 37
Private collection, acquired from the above
Exhibited
New York, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Wood Work, October 1997 - October 1998
New York, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Painting and Sculpture: Selections from the Collection Curated by Bill Katz, May 2007 - January 2008
New York, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Visual Conversations, September - December 2012
Reference
A24-03
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Status
Available
North America Divided - Neil Jenney

North America Divided - Neil Jenney

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