Work Details
Charlotte
2020
oil on canvas
48 X 30
Inventory ID: # 3455
About Jennifer Nehrbass
Jennifer Nehrbass is a painter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was born in West Bend, Wisconsin in 1970. She received her BS in art and textile design from the University of Wisconsin, an MA in Painting from New York University, and an MFA in painting from the University of New Mexico. She spent 10 years working as a design director at Ralph Lauren before pursuing her art career.
Her work is represented by Brunnhofer Galerie in Austria, Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, and Visions West Contemporary in Denver, and resides in many private collections in the United States and Europe. Her work was added into the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum.
Nerhbass’ paintings focus on style as a sublime element of tension within beauty. Thematically they evoke modern dilemmas of what it means to see and be seen in a manner that is simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Ambiguity, realism and fantasy play atmospherically in a narrative moment akin to magic realism.
Her paintings speak to forbidden thoughts and desires and suggest that somethings that is denied to the viewer. What the paintings yield is an intimacy of time and place that meanders through rich details and nuanced perplexity — bafflement being necessary to the experience of viewing as is delicate reasoning.
"Landscape painting and photography were once used to romanticize and politicize notions of manifest destiny to inspire people to move out West," Nehrbass says. "Users of social media share significant similarities. They post photos that are manipulated to create the best images to push personal and societal narratives.
"I am interested in what the best image is and if it can be created or captured. My collages explore the Western landscape with images that are pulled from various locations to become the idealized vistas. Realism mixes with abstraction to create tension between the physical and intellectual experience of space: a place where memory and reality collide."
