Brooklyn-based painter Jenna Gribbon’s figurative canvases present tender, uncanny scenes of everyday life while challenging the art historical conventions of the gaze. Gribbon reckons with the patrilineage of her medium, upending the tropes—such as the artist-muse relationship—and the established approaches that she inherited. She reconceives the act of looking as a reciprocal one, marked by empathy and mutual gratification. Utilizing the alla prima technique with a precise and animated hand, she offers unguarded glimpses into her life with her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott, as well as her young son and circle of friends. She often depicts moments that push the limits of public and private, agency and consent, and exhibition and exploitation. Painting with an acute awareness of the viewer, Gribbon plays with the voyeuristic impulse while bringing visibility to expressions of sapphic love.

Born in 1978 in Knoxville, Tennessee, Gribbon studied painting at the University of Georgia (2001) and received her MFA from Hunter College (2019). In 2011, in Long Island City, Gribbon co-founded the Oracle Club, a literary salon and creative space. Gribbon’s work has been presented in exhibitions at the Frick Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida; Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg, Germany; Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Georgia Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta; and the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, among many others. Her paintings reside in the collections of X Museum, Beijing; Dallas Museum of Art; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Brant Foundation, New York; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York.