RAIR | 2001

Jenny Hankwitz

New York City-based painter Jenny Hankwitz received her BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1983. She was a RAiR recipient in 2001. Group exhibitions include Ways and Means: A New Look at Process and Materials in Art at 1285 Avenue of the Americas, Painters Painting on Paper at Schema Projects, the 500 Park Ave Lobby Installation, and New York City's Cathedral Saint John the Divine. Her paintings have been described by Ken Johnson in The New York Times as "crisply painted swirls, blobs and bubbly shapes into radiating, spiraling compositions, producing a sudsy mix of formalist flux and Pop buoyancy.” (From RAiR 50th Anniversary Exhibition Catalog, 2017)

It was 1994 that I began making "computer drawings'. I jumped on it and never looked back. I scanned all my paintings, along with shapes, brush marks, and splatters that I had made with ink. The computer became my notebook, where I was drawing, coloring, twisting, printing, and re-working. I would tape them up on my wall at night to give them a critique, so I could change them the next day.

Working onscreen in the place between deliberation and the unexpected, my process became my own. I felt my paintings become relevant to the present. Finally I would print them tiny onto acetate, put them into slide mounts, and project them on my wall. I scale them, and make a thumbs up, thumbs down decision. From my projection I draw onto the canvas and make a painting. A handmade readymade?

The work in this show was made during my 6 month stay in Roswell. NM. There were the blasting hot days, the cool starry desert nights, and myself. The splashes and splatters signify fluid existence; our drama, exuberance, motion, music, the stars, the surf, surface, painting, lust, the pulse...

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition • “Jenny Hankwitz" • August 31 - September 30, 2001