“And in your pleasure, find eternal pain”
- Aldous Huxley’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal – Delphine and Hippolyte,” 1929
“This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, darker than the colorless beards of old men. Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths”
- Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to present Half Held By The Night, an exhibition of new paintings by Jenn Dierdorf in Gallery 2.
Speaking about her work, Dierdorf says: “Dutch vanitas and still life painting influence the Flowers series, both visually and symbolically. There is a long and interesting history of flower painting involving gender, sex, and stereotypes, in addition to commentary on temperance, piety, and even sexual freedom. There are a number of visual qualities my work explores related to abstraction and visibility. I tend to play with the image being on the cusp of being formed/being dissolved. It interests me when the work can provoke feelings of comfort and loss simultaneously.”
The darkness in Dierdorf’s paintings threatens to engulf the flowers, and the light remains caught between being extinguished and being ignited.
Jenn Dierdorf was born in Michigan City, Indiana in 1978. She received her B.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Kansas and her M.F.A. from the University of Connecticut. She has been the artist in residence at several arts programs including the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (Amherst, VA), the Contemporary Arts Center (Troy, NY), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and the Wassaic Art Project (Wassaic, NY). Her work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at Kathleen Cullen Fine Art (New York, NY), Lancaster Museum of Art (Lancaster, PA), Minnesota National Print Biennial at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN), Art Space (New Haven, CT), Kimberly Klark (Brooklyn, NY) and Cindy Rucker Gallery, (New York City, NY).