“To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light,” famed Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wrote.
Standing in front of Brooklyn artist Jenny Morgan’s newest works—spectral, beautiful oil paintings of women who appear both hyperreal and incorporeal at once—felt like looking Jung’s “shadow self” right in its many, changing eyes. “In my work, I’m thinking about the traditions within portraiture and where that leaves us,” said Morgan in a recent conversation.
Morgan, born in 1982 in Salt Lake City, Utah, is known for such breathtakingly precise paintings of women in unreal, often incandescent hues of greens and blues. Small surreal moments—a floating eye or cryptic symbol—often haunt quiet passages in these tableaux. These works have earned Morgan an increasing presence in galleries and fairs over the past five years. The artist had her first solo museum exhibition “Skin Deep” with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2017. In New York and Los Angeles, the burn has been slower but significant with her works shown in shows with pace-setting galleries including Anat Ebgi and Mother Gallery. But now the artist is poised on the verge of a major moment with “No Endings for the Wild” a debut solo exhibition with Anat Ebgi in Tribeca, which opens tomorrow (Nov. 1–Dec. 21, 2024). The gallery also recently announced her representation.
Jenny Morgan, The Descending (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York
The show spotlights paintings made over the past year. For Morgan, it is transformational and deeply personal work that grapples with loss and change. Over the past few years, the artist experienced both the death of her father and a divorce. “It was a bit like the bottom falling out,” she shared, “These paintings came from living through collective and personal experiences of grief and death. At the core, this body of work is a processing.” In the wake of tremendous personal change, Morgan immersed herself in painting, calling it her “saving grace.” “It was my time to be indulgent and make my own schedule,” she said “This was a time to rebuild.”
The works themselves are deep dives into the psyche. The two earliest works in the exhibition, The Shadow’s Exquisite Game and The Descending, show a shadowy female figure on a staircase. The woman vacillates in form, materializing in the extremities of hands and feet and dissipating into shadowy immateriality at their core. “She’s a shapeshifter,” said Morgan, of the figure. All of the women in these paintings are based on photographs Morgan’s taken of women she knows, many of whom have modeled for her for over a decade. But, the artist doesn’t always make these figures identifiable. Revealing and concealing are joint endeavors.
Jenny Morgan, Study for Seeing (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
Morgan painted both staircase works from bottom to top, in stair-like sections, a compositional and metaphorical act of ascension (the works are based on a staircase in the artist’s studio). “I think of it as an exquisite corpse,” she explained “Each step can have its own flavor, from flattened and abstracted to more dimensional.”
Jenny Morgan, In the Woods (2024).
The artist, who earned her MFA at New York’s School of Visual Arts, plays with a dizzy scope of art historical themes in her works (she says she is inspired more by periods than individual artworks, in most cases). These works, in particular, call to mind everything from Charles Willson Peale’s trompe l’oeil staircase to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) and the surrealist visions of René Magritte.
Often, these paintings quietly grapple with the constructs underpinning depictions of women over the centuries. Morgan says she was first drawn to painting women as a way of “talking about what it means or what it feels like to be in this body” beyond the male gaze, in a safe space shared between women. The odalisque, a genre of imaginary Orientalized paintings of women in harems and popular in the 19th century, she complicates, too, with her own paintings of women in moments of repose, their naked bodies lithe, but unearthly, more ghostly than sensual.
Jenny Morgan, Muse in Final Form (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
One new painting, Muse in Final Form feels like a pointed rebuttal to Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque, a triumph of Neoclassical art. In her painting, a young woman reclines naked, her torso curving like that of Ingres’ model, but she appears frontally, and her gaze, like in Ingres’s image, is direct, but here somehow more provocatively. She is daring, awakened. The blues of the blankets and pillows seen in Ingres’s interior now suffuse the entire blue-gray image. In this work, as in several others in the show, Morgan has sanded down the painting, revealing underlayers of warm paint in a way that creates an almost shimmering effect and also erodes their legibility. “Sanding away felt destructive and was a nice release in a way,” she shared. “A way to end this cycle of paintings and start a new one.”
Faces, and particularly eyes, hold potent meaning. Floating eyes hidden like berries appear throughout the paintings, as a way to “pop some awareness” into the works. Morgan often, though not always, effaces or obscures her models’ faces. It might be a way of protecting them. “I hear people say that there are no consequences in painting. It’s a place where you’re totally free,” she said. “But I do feel like there are consequences for imagery, whether it’s subtle and personal or larger than that. Imagery has a big impact.” While Morgan has, in the past, struggled with misinterpretations of the intentions behind her works, she says she has “started to embrace the pleasurable instead of forcing myself to be so psychological,” acknowledging that “an image moves through time and culture and is perceived in different ways.”
Jenny Morgan, Visitor (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
But in this place of pleasure, something psychedelic is also afoot. Hallucinogenic imagery creeps into these images to varying intensities. A decade ago, the artist went through a period of experimentation with ayahuasca and mushrooms. “It was a sincere investigation, an attempt to lift up the lid on myself,” she recalled, “It was, literally, shadow work.”
In Jung’s mapping of the psyche, the shadow self is a primordial darkness that lives inside all of us, driven by the fears and impulses of our ancient, animal minds.
Jung believed the shadow self must be reckoned with for self-actualization to occur, a process that is today called “shadow work.” “Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self,” he wrote.
Jenny Morgan, The Movement (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York.
The shadow self is here made manifest, it seems. In fact, Morgan considers one of her models her doppelgänger. A friend of the artist’s noticed the woman in Salt Lake City and texted Morgan a photo of her.
“I thought that he was sending me an old photograph of myself,” she recalled, “I had just gotten out of doing an ayahuasca ceremony so I felt like it was really important information.” Morgan ultimately tracked the doppelgänger down and asked if she would like to model. The woman has appeared in her works for nearly a decade.
In the painting The Movement, she appears seated in a chair, one leg tucked under the other, her pet snake wrapped around her neck. The entire painting reverberates with green and maroon patterning, somewhere between snakeskin and tie-dye, that radiates from the center of the painting. The woman’s face is obscured by a green haze that seems to emanate from her like an aura. Her face isn’t legible. “Sometimes it’s easy for me to address her face, but sometimes it’s deeply triggering.” Morgan admitted, “I needed to destroy her in some way.
Jenny Morgan, Study of Instinct (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York
These psychedelic gestures can be found throughout the show. In The Descending, Morgan has sewn a seam down the middle of the single work, bridging two canvases, offering a portal-like gesture in the middle of the painting’s staircase. In the delightfully strange work Study of Instinct, a woman’s face emerges within a coat of black and silvery feline fur. This is Morgan’s painting of a friend, a Chilean shaman who journeys with wild cats. In another painting Study for Seeing, a face is visible behind iridescent veils of color; this image reminded me of the visionary work of psychic artist Paulina Peavy who painted from the 1930s through 1980.
But maybe Visitor best encapsulates the show. In the blue-gray portrait of a woman’s face, one triangle of the painting appears in a green hue, like a shard or a tear into another dimension. Here, a single eye peers through, watching. Morgan tells me that the exhibition title “No Endings for the Wild” is a personal idiom, which puts a positive play on the expression “no rest for the wicked.” The wild Morgan is exploring isn’t some far-off landscape but a terrain hidden within ourselves. “Instinct and how we make decisions on a primal level is something I’ve been thinking about a lot,” she said, “I think those feelings are intense right now.”