Jenny Brillhart

We are delighted to present new works by Jenny Brillhart for Gallery Weekend 2022. Jenny Brillhart’s studio environment serves as the basis for her paintings. She starts with building and organizing often overlooked materials in her studio. This process references domestic ideas like the need to arrange, tidy, or balance. The objects are often left-over construction material, such as sheetrock, fancy packaging or insulation. Sculptural configurations of items taken out of their understood function allows for experimental arrangements and new narratives. Using time-lapse photography to record her process, Brillhart captures what might escape the eye, and references time—a visual impression of a day’s passing. The photography also pays notice to light and shadow as they weigh as much as the objects arranged.

In Brillhart’s studio space, light, time, tools and materials all impact the painting process. Everything leaves it’s mark. Brillhart’s work consistently addresses the relationship between light and shadow, surface and spatial depth, structure, balance, color and flatness. The interplay of painting, photography, and sculptural elements serve as the basis from which she examines her surroundings of her quotidian life. In particular, inconspicuous, everyday things on the margins of invisibility form the central theme of her work. In this way, the artist gives visual form to her ideas concerning the nature of object, display, and beauty.

Jenny Brillhart was born in 1972 in Keene, NH. She studied painting and drawing at Smith College and graduated with an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She then moved to Miami, Florida, where she taught drawing and painting at Art Center South Florida, University of Miami and the New World School of the Arts. Brillhart’s work has been presented throughout the US and internationally in exhibitions at the Frost Museum of Science in Miami, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Anhaltinische Gemäldegalerie Dessau, the Naples Museum of Art, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and the deCordova Museum Lincoln, among others. She lives and works in Blue Hill, Maine.