On the occasion of the exhibition the Serpentine Galleries will co-publish an exhibition catalogue with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König. It feels important to share these remarkable paintings and drawings with our audience at the Serpentine this year.’ Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, and Bettina Korek, Chief Executive, Serpentine Galleries We have returned to her works many times over the last few years, and in planning this exhibition, they have resonated strongly with the pressing themes of our time, yet continue to remain deeply personal. ‘Jennifer Packer’s paintings demonstrate great commitment from the artist and therefore demand slow, sustained attention from the viewer. Through this survey of work the exhibition will draw out timely and necessary discussions on racial politics, representation and art history. The exhibition will also include drawings which for Packer are rarely just a study but hold a weight of their own that differs from paintings. A solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, in 2017 and her participation in the Whitney Biennial 2019 in New York, together with recent awards, have seen Packer become recognised as one of the most significant artists of her generation.įeaturing 34 works dated from 2011 to 2020, the exhibition presents portraits of artists from Packer’s New York circle, monochromatic paintings, intimate interiors and flower still lifes including Say Her Name (2017), painted in response to the suspicious death of Sandra Bland, a Black American woman who is largely believed to have been murdered while in police custody in 2015. This survey exhibition, the artist’s first in a European institution, will include paintings and drawings from the past decade alongside new work created in her Bronx studio over the last twelve months. Packer notes: ‘The bouquets like Say Her Name highlighted something that's been true in my practice overall, which is this appreciation for observation and also understanding the emotional resonance of the things, the spaces in which we exist and around the people that we care about, whether we know them or not.’ These paintings about loss are often made in response to tragedies of state and institutional violence against Black Americans. Packer describes particular flower compositions as funerary bouquets and vessels of personal grief, revising the traditions of Dutch sixteenth-century vanitas paintings, which historically symbolised the transience of life. Her paintings, often worked on over extended periods of time, combine formal rigour and skill with emotional intimacy, and reward sustained and attentive looking. Care is of particular concern in Packer’s portraits what it means to represent an individual in a way that privileges their presence in the world over a painted reproduction.Ĭharacterised by a vibrant approach to colour and a powerful play of scale, Packer’s work layers, reveals and obscures her sitters through constant shifts between grounds and space, dissolving figuration into near abstraction. While the casual repose of her portraits is the result of her love and care for the sitters, Packer acknowledges the choice to paint figures is a political one: ‘Representation and particularly, observation from life, are ways of bearing witness and sharing testimony’. Combining observation, improvisation and memory, Packer’s intimate portraits of friends and family members and flower still paintings insist on the emotional and physical essence of their contemporary Black lives.
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