Bill Jensen |
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| Exhibition views |
Notes from the Loggia
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| Bill Jensen has spent a number of summers in a village southeast of Siena, creating a diverse and remarkable body of work in response to the light and landscape of Italy. The current exhibition Notes from the Loggia focuses on a large group of black and white, ink and tempera works on paper, made between 2005 and 2008. The exhibition references Chinese landscape painting and Sumi ink drawing, while extending the tradition of Abstract Expressionism and the use of gesture and process to convey emotional and spiritual content.
Also included is a selection of richly colored paintings on paper, entitled With Color, which incorporate a medium Jensen developed in Italy – dry pigment, hand-mixed with egg and oil tempera – which generates a vividly expressive range of form, translucency and color, reflecting the artist’s love of the Tuscan countryside. At the very core of Jensen’s work is a profound response to nature: the drawings “with their weathered surfaces, spectral presence and tangled calligraphy, encapsulate – sometimes brutishly, at other times with a biting elegance – the terrible beauty of the elements.” ¹ A number of works are elegiac in tone having been made at the time of Al Held’s untimely death in 2005 in Todi, Italy. Jensen has dedicated this exhibition to his longtime friend. Educated at the University of Minnesota, Bill Jensen has exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the world. His work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and others. Bill Jensen lives and works in New York. ¹Naves, Mario. “Bill Jensen, One Year Later,” The New York Observer, March 11, 2002, p. 16. |
