In Jesse Mockrin‘s recent paintings, the artist quotes depictions of women and violence throughout the history of art, taking influence from Baroque work, Renaissance etchings, and other eras. In “Syrinx,” currently running at Night Gallery, the artist crops these influences and places them side by side. (Mockrin was last featured on HiFructose.com here.) The gallery says that “she first category considers images of women under duress, while the second category reclaims the condemned figure of the witch as a feminist forebear.”
“Mockrin’s methods of cropping, enlargement, and combination destabilize her source material, invigorating them with new significance even where her renderings remain faithful,” according to Night Gallery. “These monumental, staggeringly exacting paintings are a testament to the meticulous depth of Mockrin’s research and the utter virtuosity of her hand, yet the series transcends the boundaries of her individual perspective, operating instead at the scope of history and the elevated register of the iconographic.”
See more works from the show below.
American artists — from the painters of the Hudson River School to the influential Andrew Wyeth — have long depicted this country’s vast landscape as simultaneously a place of lonely desolation and of awe-inspiring grandeur. Following in this tradition, 