Jenny Day

Biografie

Jenny Day (b.1981) is a painter and sculptor who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Arizona, a BFA in Painting from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz. Her exhibition record most recently includes Arte Laguna in Venice, Italy, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Korea, Museum of Art Fort Collins, Mesa Arts Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, Blue Star Contemporary Museum in San Antonio, TX,  and Elmhurst Museum in Chicago, IL. Day’s work has been supported by an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum, a Barron Purchase Award and through participation at Greenwich House Pottery, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and the Playa Foundation For The Arts, among others.

It is rare to find artists who have studied another subject in addition to painting. Jenny Day is one of these exceptions and it is unmistakable that her preoccupation with environmental studies has left clear traces in her thinking and painting. Her paintings show us nature, but not as we know it from landscape painting, but she creates a world all of her own. In her early works she worked a lot with collages, this technique is still recognisable in her acrylic works. Through her technique, Jenny Day manages to structure the pictorial planes and thus, in addition to smooth, almost monochrome-looking surfaces, many gestural elements are created, which occur especially in the painterly examination of the animals. There are also unmistakable references to Surrealist approaches. Mostly animals are the main motifs, these are friendly creatures, and facing the viewer and yet in a strange way they appear in fear and on the run. The peaceful animal as a symbol of the still existing original nature in a world that is anything but unharmed, where the apocalypse is already lurking behind the facades. In her ceramic works, too, she structures figures and forms with her own handwriting, which she takes directly from her immediate surroundings and devours as if nature and creatures no longer have any air to breathe. Jenny Day has found her very own and unmistakable way and style of dealing with the themes of our time, impressive, exciting, but never over-teaching and with great painterly power.

She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA).