Jenny Morgan
American, born 1982True Blue, 2015
Not on view
Silkscreen on paper
Dimensions27 × 24 in. (68.6 × 61 cm)
Gift of the artist and Driscoll Babcock Galleries, New York, 2015.58
Known for her dynamic portraits, Jenny Morgan intertwines hyper-realism with abstract graphic forms and colors. Reverberating with a vibrant aura, the colors in True Blue go beyond representation to suggest a transformative or transcendent moment. Morgan explains that the work “manipulates the figure to expose the individual’s idiosyncrasies and create a physiological portrait.” She often manipulates the color and removes any extraneous visual information to focus solely on the subject and their psychological state. Like most of her portraits, the figure in True Blue engages directly with the viewer, but seems somehow guarded, or removed, as though simultaneously inviting and repelling the viewer’s eyes.
In this silkscreen, Morgan references well-known printmakers like Andy Warhol. Executed in the same fashion as Warhol’s Jacqueline Kennedy III, Morgan printed the background colors before the black details of the form. Also like Warhol, Morgan created the outline and details of the figure with a photograph printed in halftone. Halftone is a graphic technique that simulates shading through the use of dots. Halftone prints are commonly used in newspapers to blend colors—or in this case to create shading. The closer the dots are printed together, the darker the image will become.
