NEIL JENNEY

Neil Jenny is a self-described realist painter, and even while he attended Massachusetts College of Art in 1964, he is for the most part a self-taught artist. Working against the grain of the prevailing stylistic trajectories of his time such as Photorealism, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism, since moving to New York in 1966 He worked in a style that earned the label of “Bad Painting”, at first by himself in titling a series, and then by critic and curator Marcia Tucker, who included his work in a show of the same name at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1978. The show’s title was, however, intended to denote approval of painterly irreverence and radical new approaches with respect to tradition. Tucker opens the catalogue for the exhibition with an epithet from Marcel Duchamp that reads, “Have fun. If not, you’ll bore us.”  This sentiment is perfectly aligned with Jenny’s own attitudes towards his contemporaries: to joyfully take something being done well and do it badly. Indeed, he has often been characterized as an “oddball” or “maverick” with a reputation for his verbosity and idiosyncratic form of idealism whose paintings, while certainly qualifying as figurative, possess a cartoonish, child-like quality perhaps having more in common with the illustration styles of underground and independent comic art than with this artistic tradition.

Yet for all this, Jenny has remained a stridently level and dialectical thinker who maintains that “in the whole realm of art there are only two styles: Abstraction and Realism.” His work can be said to inhabit the space between. NY Times art critic Roberta Smith has noted that during the period of 1968-70 “Mr. Jenney helped put representational painting on a new course and established precedents for the art of the 1970s, 80s and 90s.” Arguably, Jenny has likewise contributed immensely to setting the stage for a kind of ‘unskilled’ approach that has become commonplace in high-profile Contemporary Art. Aside from his appearance in the New Museum show, Jenny’s work has been included in several other historically important exhibitions, including two Whitney Biennials (1973, 1981), and the Whitney's "New Image Painting" (1978).