NYAB Event - Brad Jones “Diptychs”

Brad Jones “Diptychs”

Sargent's Daughters

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Sargent’s Daughters presents Diptychs, the debut exhibition of Brad Jones. The exhibition presents a series of oil paintings. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Linda Yablonksky and Sara Stern, and interviews between the two artists.

Brad Jones is an ongoing collaboration between artists Brandi Twilley and Jennifer Rubell which began in April 2013. The name “Brad Jones” — a loose reconfiguration of Twilley and Rubell’s first names — was imagined by the artists as belonging to the next sensational, aggressive American (male) painter.

The pair meet three times each week for two hours at a time to engage in live portrait painting sessions in which Twilley paints and a nude Rubell poses. The sessions have resulted in a series of oil-on-canvas work with tremendous range, from near-abstraction to explicit realism.

The painting/posing sessions serve as a private performance inside the collaborative’s practice. As the usual roles of muse/model and author/artist are blended in Brad Jones, the traditional process of portraiture becomes a joint performance and the paintings become both documents and artifacts of these sessions.

Brad Jones is both a refuge from and an incubator for Twilley and Rubell’s individual practices. Twilley is a Yale-trained figurative painter whose work often draws on autobiography and is characterized by its aggressive, confident mark-making. Rubell has a history of performance, sculpture, and ephemeral installations that often address the relationships between viewer, object, artist, and institution.

The paintings in Diptychs address the role of traditional paintings and subjects in a manner that subverts the established positions of painter and sitter. As a record of a performance, the paintings carry the emotional weight of each session’s atmosphere and the subtle daily changes that occur. The paintings themselves stand as both diaristic record and witness to an evolving collaboration.