Artist’s Statement:

My work is abstract and non-objective, characterized by a sparse sense of geometry and lush, rich, and complex color. The language of abstraction is a flexible and suggestive language with the ability to evoke a range of associations, and non-specific emotional or meditative responses, free from specific references or imagery.

Though the term constructions may best describe what I do, I consider the works more related to painting than sculpture because of the frontal orientation meant to be seen on the wall, and the importance of color and color relationships. My interest in the intersection between painting and object, with work that calls attention to its physicality, has been an ongoing characteristic of my work throughout my painting life. 

In the current work, the salvaged wood is often origin and/or counterpoint to the color interventions, which stand clearly defined in opaque, matte, and uninflected paint application. Color notations or the use of found color in the form of paint chips or colored papers have become a foundational part of my working process despite the fact that the decisions about color are intuitive.

Landscape, light and weather, place and incidental moment, joy and wonder in color, and color mixing/seeing are my ongoing inspiration.

Review Excerpts:

“In Feinberg’s work, dread and wonder overlap”
         John Yau, Artforum

“An almost sculptural challenge to painting is offered…the gesture into three dimensions keeps its force. Feinberg manages, finally, a lively stand-off between two- and three-dimensional impulses.”
         Carter Ratcliff, Art International

“They have a combination of gestural openness, an acute compositional sense poised on disintegration, and a rippling room-filling light that gives me goose bumps…You know you are in the presence of a real poet of abstract painting when the image pierces your heart before you’ve figured out what you’re looking at.”
         Stephen Westfall, Art in America

“…”Landscape(2)”, which, when combined with the “42 Whites”, make a memorable and intriguing statement on how subtle form and color can affect mood.”
         D. Dominick Lombardi, The New York Times

“A quiet assurance suffuses Feinberg’s recent work, though she is not a complacent painter…All in all, Feinberg’s new paintings are less aggressive than her previous work and – perhaps in spite of themselves – more seductive.”
         Nancy Princenthal, Artnews

"Feinberg gravitates toward the frankness of physical fact, so three-dimensional form has a natural appeal for her. But she is also devoted to the poetic implications of surface nuance and color. One of her strengths is an ability to create a pronounced sense of materiality while evoking the immaterial and evanescent. Her work of recent years expresses this duality with increasing clarity."
         David Hornung, 2013

“The fragility and delicacy of these paintings, which does not preclude a real toughness that is evident in the rigor of their attention…their sensuality is chastened by a severe sense of morality of form. It’s as scrupulous a response to the twilight of modernism as any.”
         Barry Schwabsky, Arts

“Feinberg’s subtly hued, rusticated, minimalist constructions are very much in line with the accomplished abstract canvases she has exhibited throughout her career. Her loose, but thoughtful and spatial geometric style has always been concerned with planar color…Her sensitivity to light, shape, and line transforms…”
         Jeanette Fintz, The Artful Mind

JEAN FEINBERG
June 30 – August 6, 2016

Jean Feinberg began exhibiting her work as an invited artist at the women’s gallery A.I.R. and at the new Mary Boone Gallery both then in Soho. She went on to join the Rosa Esman and Victoria Munroe Galleries in New York.

Her work has been in solo and group shows in some of the following places: the National Academy Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Princeton Museum of Art, Angles Gallery in California, John Davis Gallery, Beth Urdang in Boston, Stefan Stux Gallery, the Jersey City Museum, and Galeria Durban in Venezuela.

She has been the recipient of grants, fellowships, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Edward Albee Foundation.

Her works are represented in public and private collections in the US and Europe including the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Parasol Press, Werner Kramarsky, Best Products, IBM Corporation, Amerata-Hess, and Champion International, and has been reviewed Art in America, Artforum, Arts, Art International, ArtNews, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe among others.

Jean has taught and lectured about her work at academic institutions including the Parsons School of Design, Princeton University, the Chicago Art Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts where she taught in residence for many years. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Fine Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

She holds a BS in Fine Arts from Skidmore College and an MA in Painting from Hunter College.

Jean’s experience and love of the Hudson Valley with its particular light and color has had a profound effect on her life and work.