Jenny Watson

Cool World, 2006
part 1: acrylic on rabbit skin glue pinned Chinese organza over daisy printed cotton; part 2: industrial paint and velvet ribbon on prepared oval stretcher
part 1: 219 x 83 cm; part 2: 79 x 30 cm

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Provenance
Roxlyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

Exhibited
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery at Art Basel 38, Basel, Switzerland, June 2007


Jenny Watson is known for work that is in equal parts as personal, as it is conceptual. Heavily influenced by the punk and feminist movements of the 1970s, Watson developed a deliberately naïve painting style which she has carefully honed from the 1980s to the present day. 

Regularly making use of collage, including sculptural elements like ribbons, photographs and horsehair, Watson is known for figurative works that are ambiguous as to their subject – either the artist herself, or else a character or persona through which Watson can channel her visual and conceptual ideas. 

The larger canvas of the Cool World diptych depicts a woman (probably the artist herself) riding a grey horse. Watson bought her first horse in 1984 and has had a lifelong passion for horses and horse riding, a perennial subject in her paintings.

Around the mid-2000s, Watson created a number of works on pinned Chinese organza, decorative fabrics that call to mind domestic interior textures like curtains, bedspreads and tablecloths.  Since at least the early 1990s, the use of multiple canvases in a single work, which play with asymmetry and juxtaposition of scales and subjects between panels is seen. Her Venice Biennale exhibition, Paintings with Veils and False Tails, contained hand-painted captions in one panel that were read alongside larger, figurative paintings. But there are only a handful of works in which Watson’s smaller panel, instead of text, contained another solely visual element.

In Transgression (2005), for example, the artist affixed a knot of hair on a painted, oval canvas. Here in Cool World, the artist has attached a velvet ribbon on the smaller canvas, mirroring the horse’s tail from the larger canvas and the rider’s hair tied in a bun. Cool World was exhibited at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery's booth at Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland in 2007.

Later that year, for a solo exhibition at Oxley's in Sydney, Serena Bentley wrote about Watson’s practice as follows:“Watson describes her work as ‘post-conceptual.’ Her pared-back expressionism is characterised by an urgency of execution that allows for direct communication unhindered by formal conventions. Her resulting figures evince a powerful emotional energy. Inhabiting large vistas of decorative fabric that amplify their interiority, they occupy a floating world.” (Serena Bentley, Jenny Watson: Star Material, catalogue essay, unpaginated.)