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Jennifer Sullivan

BIG GIRL PAINTINGS

Los Angeles | March 22 - May 15 2014







New York based artist Jennifer Sullivan calls her working process ‘cathartic and  improvisational karaoke’. While singing and dancing she reclaims the past, performing radical makeovers of her source materials, refracting her own experiences and emotions through a variety of found imagery and objects. In her solo exhibition at 5 Car Garage, Sullivan has re-purposed an entire exhibition—or at the very least it's title, "BIG GIRL PAINTINGS"— by Julian Schnabel at New York’s Gagosian gallery in 2002, which featured enormous portraits of young blond women whose eyes have been covered by raw, horizontal swaths of paint. The series was based on an amateur portrait that Mr. Schnabel found in a thrift store and subjected to his own painterly alterations.


Sullivan—also partial to the occasional thrift store rummage—takes a playful handbag swipe at Schnabel as she toys with both the original context, the historically male-centric art canon, and the artist’s own persona as young woman full of blond ambition. But, unlike Schnabel's vision, Sullivan’s BIG GIRLS can clearly see — her  acknowledgement of her maturity as an artist and the need to step up to the plate after the death of her mother last year. Willingly evoking feminine attributes often seen as negative (soft, wet, sensitive, emotional), Sullivan brings us intimate portraits of her mother, re-makings of her mother's art, imagined self-portraits, as well as incorporating a variety of personal objects such as casts of fingers and the artists hand  along with items she recently inherited.

While grappling with her place in a male dominated art world, the artist also lovingly explores the unrealized artistic career of her mother, an aspiring amateur artist who suffered from Bipolar Disorder throughout her adult life.

This exhibition is dedicated in loving memory to Marian Mingos, née Marian Garber.