Jenny Hager is a Los Angeles based artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has a BA from Knox College, Illinois, a post baccalaureate from the New York Studio of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, NYC, and an MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Knox College, West Los Angeles College, and Santa Monica College. Jenny has received two Joan Mitchell Foundation Grants, a research grant from Knox College, a merit and teaching grant from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Professional Artist in Residence Scholarship from Ox-Bow. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Atlanta, London, Berlin, Brisbane, Lecce, Paros, and Budapest. She has participated in art fairs, including Miami Projects (Miami), Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm), Spring Break (Los Angeles), and QiPO 01 (Mexico City), and her work has been shown in the Reykjavik Art Museum (ISL), the Torrence Art Museum (Los Angeles), the Riverside Art Museum (Los Angeles), the Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA), the San Diego Art Institute (San Diego). She has also participated in the Yokohama Triennale (Japan). Hager is a member of the collective Durden and Ray (which has a gallery in the Bendix Building), in Los Angeles, and has shown at the Berry Campbell Gallery (NYC), Paul Thiebaud Gallery (San Francisco), the Bentley Gallery (Phoenix), and Gross McCleaf Gallery (Philadelphia), and HClub, Los Angeles.

“Mountains, Monsters and Cosmos” is the exploration of complex traumas (both personal and observed), situated in the immediate experience of the chaos and expansiveness of such moments, as well as the synthesis and examination of such experiences as it becomes one narrative of many.In choosing a more abstract format, I have centralized negation and painting as palimpsest in the service of exploring the tension between the explicable and the inexplicable. Negation and the act of covering produces a hierarchy of things allowed to speak and things that are censured. Scraping, building layers, and the use of taping to create patterning (screens, barriers, obfuscation, and noise) against organic ephemera enable me to find a space that embodies a representation of confrontation and incomprehensibility that defies categorization through language structures and resides in the visceral. Mountains, monsters, and cosmos are recurring themes in my work, weaving together landscape, mythology, the uncanny, and the double-edged sword of wonder.

Exhibitions:

The Dinner Party