Bill Jensen

(American, born 1945)

Bill Jensen is a contemporary American painter whose abstract works consist of biomorphic forms and sophisticated color arrangements. Influenced by Eastern philosophy and the brooding paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Jensen’s compositions are meditatively worked and reworked. “I seem to use the idea of seepage, where I will dredge something up physically in the painting, look at it, and then let it seep down again and then dredge it up again,” he has explained. “Through this process, a hallucination of something might be in the painting.” Born on November 26, 1945 in Minneapolis, MN, he received both his BFA and MFA from the University of Minnesota. After finishing school, Jensen relocated to New York where to take a short recess from oil painting after a toxic reaction to them left him sick. Scaling down the size of his canvases, Jensen returned to painting, and through the 1980s had a number of important exhibitions. He continues to live and work in New York, NY. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.