Untitled Art Miami

In Jennifer Coates's recent paintings, ancient deities appear like ghosts in the abstracted landscape of rural Pennsylvania. Figures merge with their surroundings as weeds and trees become a site of both Pagan ritual and painterly event. The works hang together like tapestries with a variety of marks slowly accumulating in layers and zones to create a flickering but cohesive whole.  Coates is in conversation with art history, engaging Modernist landscapes, Baroque painting, and ancient Roman frescoes. Light effects are amplified and color is intensified, suffusing the paintings with the glow of synthetic chemistry. While oil paint references earth and flesh, Coates's use of acrylic paint speaks to the history of plastics and dyes. Fluorescent paints, colors of safety and warning, are used to heighten the dense, hallucinatory scenes.

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Jennifer Coates is an artist working in Brooklyn, NY and Lakewood, PA. Her work is currently included in, And So Did Pleasure Take the Hand of Sorrow and They Wandered Through the Land of Joy, a group show centered around the drawings of Marsden Hartley, running October 28 - March 18th at the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, ME. Recent solo shows include Para Pastoral at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Lesser Gods of Lakewood, PA at High Noon Gallery, NYC; and Pagan Forest, West Chester University. Recent group shows include Unnatural Nature: Post Pop Landscapes at Acquavella Galleries in NYC and Palm Beach, FL, curated by Todd Bradway, and Psychedelic Landscape at Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC. She is the 2021 recipient of the John Koch Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2021 NYFA Award in painting, a 2019 Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Sharpe Walentas Studio residency (2018-2019). Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, Art Critical, the Huffington Post, Smithsonian Journeys, and Art News, among other publications.