Neil Jenney

Neil Jenney ( b. 1945 in Torrington, Connecticut, USA, lives in New York City ) is an American contemporary artists and representatives of the New Realism in painting, known for its bathroom Paintings.

Life and work

Neil Jenney is a largely self-taught as an artist. He attended the Massachusetts College of Art in 1964. In 1966 he moved to New York City where he has lived and worked ever since.

The style of his painting was described by the art critic Marcia Tucker in 1978 as Bad Painting, a description that Jenney accepted as accurate.

Jenney describes his style as realistic, but in an idiosyncratic use of the word, meaning a style, find truths in the stories in a simple relationship of the objects. His pictures tell little angry or funny stories. Stories that take place in the mind of the observer, when he sees it, and the persons or objects depicted brings in relationship to each other.

The beginning of his painting in the years 1969/1967, the period in which to pay the minimalism and photorealism, to which he responded with his style. Neil Jenney was always against the photo-realism in painting. The work of Neil Jenney at this time had a great influence: the art critic for the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote " in these two years helped Jenney representational painting on a new course and established precedents for the art of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. "

In 1972, he was with four of his images participant in Documenta 5 in Kassel in the Department realism '.

His works belong to the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA, Los Angeles and The Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA, Los Angeles.

Literature and sources

• Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
• Documenta Archive (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X
• NEIL Jenney, THE BAD YEARS 1969-70, Paul Gardner, New York 2001, ISBN 1-880154-50-1