Jennifer Packer Confronts Grief Through Paintings That Cut Deep

"Even before her partner, the much-adored poet April Freely, passed away in 2021, Jennifer Packer was a painter of remembrance. Her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which opened months after Freely's death, included "Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!)," a tribute to Breonna Taylor, the young medical worker whose murder by police, along with that of George Floyd, sparked worldwide Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020."

"It was Packer's ability to evoke the emotional intensity of loss without depicting Taylor directly that struck me then - in the painting, she homes in instead on a young man lying on a couch in an acid yellow interior, surrounded by seemingly insignificant objects picked out of the miasma. "The logic is that of a mind seizing on inconsequential things in the process of coming to terms with an overwhelming grief," I wrote at the time. Likewise, her tender portraits of friends veered between inchoate mark making and stunning specificity; even if their faces were blurred and scumbled, even if they melted into their monochrome surrounds, they were represented with an exactitude that allowed them to be fully and lovingly rendered."

"In Dead Letter, her latest show at Sikkema Molloy Jenkins, Packer hones her painting to a delicate, razor-sharp edge, one that cuts deep into the questions of how people impress themselves onto the world and what traces they leave after they are gone. "What might generous observation, precision of language, representational urgency, and space for error produce? What is it to witness and be recognized in ways that transform quality and clarity of life?" she writes in her artist's statement."

Jennifer Packer centers painting on remembrance and the emotional textures of loss, using tender, translucent surfaces and intimate compositions. A Whitney exhibition included a tribute to Breonna Taylor that avoided direct depiction, instead focusing on a solitary figure amid an acid yellow interior and incidental objects to suggest a mind grasping at detail during overwhelming grief. Portraits move between inchoate mark-making and acute specificity, with blurred faces maintaining a palpable exactitude within monochrome surrounds. The Dead Letter exhibition intensifies this approach, sharpening formal precision while probing how people impress themselves on the world and leave traces that alter recognition and life’s clarity.

Read at Hyperallergic