Jesse Mockrin’s luminous oil paintings extract details from European Old Master paintings, reformulating and recontextualizing cultural narratives and art historical motifs to speak to the present.
“In referencing art history in my work, I am particularly interested in the ever-evolving meaning attached to images, how they transform over time and across culture, and how the act of bringing them into our present context expands their resonance now.”
The Descent, 2024, Mockrin’s largest work to date, will debut at Frieze London 2024 as part of a presentation that explores three historical or biblical narratives – the Abduction of the Sabine Women, the Judgement of Solomon, and varied representations of Mary Magdalene. For centuries, visual representations of these characters and tales have placed suffering and titillation right up against one another. Stories that brim with violence, violation, and even death have given male artists artistic license to explore imagery of the female form in desperate motion. Mockrin’s paintings complicate and radically re-envision her source material, “serving to expose these biases hidden within the canon – to make them visible, to upend them.”
