Artist’s reception:
Thursday, February 19, 2015
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

ClampArt is very pleased to announce “Jill Greenberg: ‘Paintings,’” the artist’s eighth solo show at the gallery.

Well known for her daring and experimental photographic portraits, Jill Greenberg has returned to drawing and painting with real, physical pigment. Applying and combining a variety of paints—from oil to acrylic to gouache—on a glass support, the artist lights the surface with a combination of artificial and natural light before photographing tight details of the abstract compositions by use of a sophisticated digital camera back which allows for maximum detail. While contrast and hue are pushed in the digital capture software, the images themselves are all authentic recordings of the ever-changing light reflected off the paint. Greenberg’s wet and dry pigments fuse creating a dizzying and dynamic field of scrapes and bubbles.

Greenberg purposely took on the medium of painting in response to the appropriation tactics of certain Pictures Generation artists who mine photographic images from mass media, advertising, and the fine arts. These artworks, which have historically been understood to call into question Modernist conceits such as autonomy and originality, have now become so ensnared in the market, they have folded back upon themselves and raise ethical issues concerning fair use and, of course, copyright.

By photographing paintings Greenberg is evoking contemporary criticism concerning medium specificity and what Rosalind Krauss has called “The Post-Medium Condition.” Interested in displacing and disrupting formalist definitions, Greenberg further confounds by thwarting the endless reproducibility of the photographic image and offers her mural-sized pieces as unique, one-of-a-kind art objects.

Jill Greenberg’s work has appeared in numerous prestigious publications such as the New Yorker, Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Sun, Blink, Harper’s Magazine, Art Ltd Magazine, and French Photo. Her photographs have been exhibited in a great number of gallery and museum exhibitions all around the world, including mid-career retrospectives at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida and Fotografiska in Stockholm, Sweden. Her art is represented in such permanent collections as the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; The Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among others.

For more information please contact Brian Paul Clamp, Director, or visit the gallery’s website at www.clampart.com. ClampArt is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.