DC Moore Gallery is honored to present two concurrent exhibitions, Yvonne Jacquette: Looking Up/Down/Inside/Outand Yvonne Jacquette: Recent Views, Maine & New York, following the recent passing of Yvonne Jacquette on April 23, 2023. The long-planned exhibitions, organized in collaboration with Yvonne Jacquette and her son Tom Burckhardt, will open as scheduled at DC Moore Gallery on May 4, 2023, with the support of her family as a tribute to her life and work.
Looking Up/Down/Inside/Outfeatures the artist’s paintings and works on paper from 1962-1976. Rarely seen together, these early works exemplify Jacquette’s consistent intensity of gaze and unique vantage point expressed throughout her career.
In the early 1960s, Jacquette began painting her immediate reality from unusual points of view: looking through the windows of the flower district near her apartment on West 29th Street, down at her son’s toys on the floor, or up at the light reflected on the tin ceiling while practicing yoga. As Lilly Wei writes in the exhibition catalogue, these works assert the beauty of the mundane, “scrutinizing commonplace objects and spaces usually not accorded a starring role in paintings.” Jacquette, and other women artists at this time, “believed that domestic objects could be the subject of art, could become art, beliefs supported by feminist theories that would eventually upend the existing paternalistic canon.”
Her 1967 work, The James Bond Car Painting was included in the group exhibition, Realism Now, at Vassar College Art Gallery in 1968, marking her first recognition as part of the New Realist movement. In the catalogue essay for the exhibition, Linda Nochlin formulates New Realism as characterized by largeness of scale, a field like flatness, a concern with measurement, and the use of photographic techniques such as cropping, close-ups and disjunction of scale. Nochlin argues that “not since the Impressionists, has there been a group so concerned with the problems of vision and their solution in terms of pictorial notation and construction.”
Several of the works on view were created in Maine, where Yvonne Jacquette spent time in the summer of 1964, renting a house with her husband, photographer Rudy Burckhardt, poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, and painters Mimi Gross and Red Grooms, near Alex and Ada Katz. In this collaborative, familial environment, and in the following years after purchasing a house there, Jacquette began experimenting with plein-air painting, inspired by her new surroundings. The works from this period push against traditional landscape painting, instead depicting cropped and angled views of barn interiors and exteriors, windows, and skies.
An illustrated catalog with the essay by Lilly Wei, “From There to Here: Up, Down, Around,” accompanies the exhibition.
Concurrently on view is Yvonne Jacquette: Recent Views, Maine & New York, a group of new paintings completed in 2022. Throughout her career, New York City and Maine served as continual sources of inspiration for the artist. These recent works depict intimate views from her New York City studio and her backyard in Maine, returning to the immediacy of her early works. She maintained her fascination with precise architectural detail, while embracing rhythmic brushwork and disjointed views of the landscape. Putting these new paintings in conversation with her historic works illuminates Jacquette’s singular point of view, capturing her immediate surroundings as moments paused in time.
Yvonne Jacquette (1934-2023) lived and worked in New York City and Searsmont, Maine. Her work is included in the current exhibitions Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence (2023) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Scenes of New York City: The Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld Collection (2021-2023), and the recent exhibitions At First Light: Two Centuries of Art in Maine (2022) at the Bowdoin Museum of Art, ME; and Slab City Rendezvous (2018-19) at the Farnsworth Art Museum, ME. In 2010, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art organized the exhibition Yvonne Jacquette––Aerials: Paintings, Prints, Pastels.
In 2008, the Museum of the City of New York organized Under New York Skies: Nocturnes by Yvonne Jacquette. A comprehensive retrospective, Aerial Muse: The Art of Yvonne Jacquette, originated at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, CA in 2002 and traveled to Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; and the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY.
Jacquette’s work is included in the collections of over forty museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; New-York Historical Society, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Portland Museum of Art, ME; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; Stanford University Art Museum, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.
For press inquiries, please contact Caroline Magavern at cmagavern@dcmooregallery.com.