“We are queens, chiefs, masters, the artists of our own destiny. I enter this great studio called life and find that I am one with Soul-fire, the central light of being.” —Jennifer Wynne Reeves

Jennifer Wynne Reeves (1963–2014) was a uniquely unpredictable artist and writer who accepted the challenge of making something new at a time when her chosen medium, painting, was largely considered passé. By all accounts, she shirked the pieties of the art world in order to preserve her dignity and unrelenting authenticity. This disposition—an allergy to bullshit, paired with a willingness to call it out—is manifested in Reeves’s paintings as it was throughout her life. According to Philip Douglas Heilman, an art dealer and longtime friend of the late artist, this uncompromising attitude may have had a repelling effect on powerful players in the art world who could have otherwise advanced her career. At his public gallery in Hudson, which opened earlier this year, Heilman has mounted a compact retrospective spanning nearly two decades, showcasing nineteen of Reeves’ paintings and mixed-media works to commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death and rekindle the conversation around her idiosyncratic artworks. Titled A painter’s rule: Have a plan but be willing to throw it all away, the show takes its name from one of the works on display, whereupon that mantra is hastily scrawled, as if she attempted to find the right words in real time.
Reeves’s small abstractions from the early to mid-’90s are complemented in this exhibition by a selection of later works, conveying a wider breadth of her accomplishments as an artist. Among the most unforgettable pieces on display is the flatly painted Masturbates to Sex and the City (2002), one of several images in which Reeves used language to confront her real-life adversaries, such as critics and dealers. The composition features a green phallic shape ejaculating an alternating pattern of white and blue spurts into a cluster of yellow, black, and gold brushstrokes. Above this disembodied climax, tiny text arcs with the phrase, “Art critic thinks pop culture is the only now, masturbates to Sex in the City.” Such works from her oeuvre address heavy realities—depression, religious disillusionment, and navigating an art world governed mostly by men, to name a few—but Reeves assuages these themes with offbeat and occasionally acerbic sense of humor.

Another aspect of Reeves’s practice is represented by ten selections from her “Day” series, created during a month in the winter of 1994 when she set out to paint one picture per day. The images range in scale, mood, and degree of figuration but are united in their apparent impetus: the artist is playing with paint, testing its capacity to signify. Day 9 and Day 10, for instance, are abstracted scenes reminiscent of Armageddon. The former roars with inferno as clumps of ashy pink rain down from above like asteroids, whereas the latter depicts a dusky landscape slathered with murky green paint to the point of near-total obfuscation—suggesting a world ended not in fire or ice, but oil. In Day 12, Reeves disrupts a traditional landscape sketch—rendered in black pencil, it shows a row of rotund trees in a field leading to a vanishing point at the right edge—by overlaying it with squiggly improvisations of painted lines that are almost insolent in their disregard for perspective. Two later works in the series, the entirely non-representational Day 22 and Day 25, comprise buoyant layers of color intruded upon by phallic shapes and crustaceous globs of paint. Throughout the series, Reeves counters beauty with disorder, as if to insist one isn’t nearly as seductive without the other.

While most of the works on view stage confrontations between opposing forces, White Bird, painted just a year before Reeves’s passing, is distinct in its tranquil affect. The eponymous bird, described with a delicate calibration of white strokes, appears to have just taken flight from the bottom left of the canvas. Along that edge, a narrow column of mottled blues stands in the foreground near a stack of dark, earthy dollops of green, brown, and black paint. Both the truncated column and the stack take on an anthropomorphic quality, as if they are companions seeing the bird off as it begins its journey. The composition further unfolds into a flat expanse—one rendered as a quiet brown foreground and cloudless, rather eerie celadon sky meeting at a subtly lopsided horizon.
Jennifer Wynne Reeves: A painter’s rule: Have a plan but be willing to throw it all away, appeared at Philip Douglas Fine Art, Hudson, N.Y., Oct. 12–Nov. 22, 2024