Jenny Brillhart
Jenny Brillhart finds subjects for her exquisitely rendered paintings in unexpected and often overlooked places, materials and scenes plucked from everyday life that arrest her attention. Photographed and assembled in collages or made into three-dimensional arrangements in the studio, the commonplace become subjects for her spare, elegant compositions. Painted in mostly muted tones with considered notes of color, light and shadows play a dominant role, lending an atmosphere of stillness and calm to her work. The influence of Shaker design and craftsmanship runs deep, as do the Precisionist paintings of Charles Scheeler. Her masterly mark-making defines shape, space, and gravity.
Brillhart received her BFA from Smith College, Northampton, MA, and MFA in painting from The New York Academy of Art, with additional studies at The Art Students League, New York, NY. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kuckei + Kuckei Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL; and numerous other solo and group exhibitions throughout Maine, Florida, Germany, and Spain. In 2019, Brillhart's work was included in the New England Biennial Exhibition at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, and in 2017, in the two-person exhibition Temporality: Jenny Brillhart & Sara Stites at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. She lives and works in Blue Hill, ME.
Jenny Brillhart’s premiere solo exhibit in Maine is an event that needs your attention. On first seeing the paintings in her exhibit, “Placement,” at Bangor’s Zillman Art Museum through April 21, one sees elegant geometrical abstractions in close, light greys and muted colors, a series of works investigating spare composi-tions and their spatial variations.
Brillhart can paint. Her scenes are not only accurate, but also precise, and she can handle the brush and knife with a rare ability, which she uses to excellent effect. These scenes will strike many (at first, at least) as being as cold as the aluminum on which she paints. The sense of remove, however, dissolves as we begin to see the hyper-realistic images as paintings rather than photographically observed scenes. It’s easy to miss Brillhart’s marks because they play their representational parts so well, but with a closer look (I mean this literally – when you get close to the canvas to observe the surface), her mark making appears as nothing short of masterly – and it is handled to brilliant effect.