Neil Jenney

Neil Jenney was born in Torrington, Connecticut in 1945. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art between 1964 and 1966 before relocating to New York City in 1966, where he has lived and worked since. Early on, he supported himself with various jobs, including driving a taxi, while continuing to make art with materials gathered from his surroundings. His initial work focused on environmental sculpture, but he soon shifted toward painting, which he found more sustainable as a primary practice.

By the late 1960s, Jenney was producing paintings in a deliberately rough acrylic style. In 1969, he began working with oil on wood panels, a medium he would continue to use extensively. During this period, he also introduced large, hand-built frames, often painted black and stenciled with the work’s title. These frames became integral to the presentation and meaning of his paintings, underscoring the objecthood of the works themselves. Between 1969 and 1970, his art was associated with “Bad Painting,” a term applied by curator Marcia Tucker, and one that Jenney occasionally adopted in his own descriptions. He later characterised his approach as a form of “realism,” by which he meant depictions of simple relationships between objects that conveyed narrative truths. Critics and historians have observed that this early period contributed to renewed attention toward representational painting at a time when abstraction and conceptual art were dominant.

In 1978, Jenney was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. His paintings are represented in major institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Over time, his themes expanded from object relationships to include environmental and social subjects such as natural landscapes, pollution, and militarism. His work also evolved materially, from acrylic on canvas to oil on wood, and later to large-scale oil on canvas paintings that he constructed and transported with attention to their physical presence.

Throughout his career, Neil Jenney has pursued a consistent exploration of painting as both an image and an object, presenting works that examine relationships between forms, environments, and cultural conditions. His position within American art since the late 1960s has been marked by his inclusion in key exhibitions, his representation in major museum collections, and his sustained practice across decades.

Major Solo Exhibitions

• 1968 – Sculpture exhibition, Cologne

• 1969 – Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Whitney Museum, New York

• 1981–82 – Painting and Sculpture 1967–1980, traveling survey (Berkeley, Houston, Washington DC, Amsterdam, Humlebaek, Basel)

• 1994 – Natural Rationalism, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

• 2001 – The Bad Years 1967–70, Gagosian Gallery, New York

• 2007 – North America, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut

• 2013 – Works of the Jenney Archive, Gagosian Gallery, New York

• 2017 – Drawings & Paintings, Gagosian Gallery, New York

• 2018 – American Realist, New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

• 2021 – American Realism Today, Gagosian Gallery, New York

• 2024 – Idealism Is Unavoidable, Gagosian Gallery, New York

Selected Group Exhibitions

• 1969 – Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Whitney Museum, New York

• 1978 – New Image Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

• 1978 – Bad Painting, New Museum, New York

• 1981 – Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

• 1985 – Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

• 1991 – Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

• 2023–24 – Framing Nature’s Paradox: Neil Jenney & Donald Sultan, 1969–2023, Morris Museum