Jenkins Johnson Gallery, 521 W 26th Street, Floor 5, New York, NY 10001 t: 212.629.0707 f: 212.629.4255
Jenkins Johnson Gallery announces the opening of Rene Lynch’s solo exhibition, which includes work from the series’ Wonderland, Secret Life of the Forest, and Gaze. The show opens with the artist’s reception on Wednesday, July 25 from 6:00-8:00 pm in New York and closes on August 31st. The gallery will be open in July and August, Monday-Friday from 11-5 pm. The exhibition can also be viewed at jenkinsjohnsongallery.com.
Rene Lynch’s watercolor series, Wonderland, is directly inspired by summer and the innate response of watching her backyard garden bloom with flora and teem with insects and frogs. The tiny dramas that unfold in this plot of land in the middle of Brooklyn demonstrate the sensual nature of Mother Nature’s busiest time of year. True and raw emotions rise to the surface, allowing deeper connections to the more primitive psychological and physical character of our world. Hot summer days and long evenings bring adults in touch with Druidism and revisit the enchanting, heightened realities we dwelled in as children when our innocence still remained intact and willingly surrendered to the magic of falling down the rabbit’s hole.
The images depict the boundary between beauty and decay, innocence and experience to examine where childish fantasy collides with growing realizations of the body’s sensuality and power on the cusp of adolescence. The unself-conscious exuberance in a child inevitably wanes, but the middle ground before tastes are tamed is when instincts are honed and sharpest, savage, reckless, and extravagant. There is an honesty found then that is not regained after we become adults with responsibilities, regrets and obligated to society’s expectations and limits. Lynch places her subjects against glowing, empty fields of white stripped down to let the subject become iconic and stand as symbol to that time when our intuitive selves are brimming with raw emotion and confusing desires.
Similarly, in her series Secret Life of the Forest, we see young women taken into the forest where Lynch analyzes the blurred boundary of childish fantasy colliding with growing realizations of sexuality and the wider world - moments when a girl breaks free and feels desire. Under veils of branches and technicolor skies, these subjects are vulnerable icons of not only a coming of age, but a greater consideration of the world around us and where it will stand in the future. War, ecological concerns, indulgence, and materialism are major factors plaguing contemporary society that younger generations and those to come will face as even harsher realities then we do ourselves.
The Gaze works are not intended to be particular individuals; rather, they are composites of live models and images appropriated from contemporary media sources to create conceptual portraits of adolescence. Unlike traditional portraits, which are most concerned with likeness or flattering facsimiles, Lynch manipulates features in subtle ways to adhere to a version of a specific look or type. There is a connection here to contemporary photographers that create dramatic or theatrical set-up shots and digitally alter images, such as Rineke Dijkstra or Loretta Lux.
Whereas Lynch’s larger work involve fairytale narrative, in Gaze she distills the power and unguarded traits of adolescence into a reduced image of a face. Girls and women are typically depicted in advertising, fashion and art as objects of desire rarely engaged directly with the viewer behind their pleasant, vacuous masks. Moreover, females throughout the centuries have been not only victims, but willing practitioners of objectification. The Gaze looks at young women and allows them to look at you in an acknowledgement of mutual attraction, distrust or manipulation in a humanist, non-objectifying, exchange.
As a contemporary, figurative painter, Lynch utilizes her love of Holbein and Cranach the Elder, for their economy of means, the light of Vermeer and Luc Tuymans, the subtle stylizations of Inges, and Balthus, Egon Schiele's line and sexual energy, and Frida Kahlo's lush directness, as well as the austerity of American folk paintings of children. She is more interested in a humanistic, direct, unflinching examination than in extreme stylizations or distortions. Particularly, Lynch culls her talent and inspirations to analyze manipulations of desire and desirability inherent in this age by not over stylizing thus opening an honest dialogue about psychologically loaded times in life.
Rene Lynch has shown at Haus der Kunst (Contemporary Art Institute), Munich; Galerie Kaysser, Munich; Kenise Barnes, New York; AG Gallery, Brooklyn; HPGRP, New York; Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn; Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ; La Cité des Arts, Paris; Atelier Lacourièdre-Frélaut, Paris; Parsons School of Design Gallery, Paris; Abroms Art Center, New York; LIU Gallery, Brooklyn; Center for Book Arts, New York; Artist’s Space, New York; Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn; and White Columns, New York. Additionally, she exhibited new paintings at scopeNY, scopeHamptons, Bridge Miami, and Tease Art Fair in Cologne. Upcoming shows include an exhibition at HPGRP in Tokyo and watercolors at the Istanbul Biennial.