Danielle Orchard “Mother’s Magazines”

Jack Hanley

[Image: Danielle Orchard "Bra Strap (After Kirchner)" (2019) Oil on canvas 55 x 42 in.]

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Jack Hanley Gallery presents Mother’s Magazines, Danielle Orchard’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Borrowed from a Cate Le Bon song, the title of the show refers to the way girls and women consume and often mimic the representation of other bodies - a motif that has continued to unfold throughout Orchard’s paintings.

The mainly large canvases in the exhibition depict scenes of women leisurely lounging around the park or the pool, sipping wine in the bathtub or looking at themselves in the mirror. Absent-mindedly, the women here don’t seem to fully take part in the activities they’re pictured in. Succumbed to ennui, their eyes drift into space, escaping their present settings and the poses they take on.

In The Pool in Palm Springs a woman in a black bathing suit lays pool side on a lounge chair, holding a set of cards in her left hand while unnaturally tilting her head upside down like Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse. Her gaze is introverted and simultaneously directed at the viewer. While referencing visual language of modernist paintings - sometimes specific like in Bra Strap (After Kirchner) - the women in Orchard’s painting don’t pose for their male painters anymore. Instead, they seem to take on performative gestures and acts that have entered the collective memory through art, fashion and pop culture.

In a play with formal elements of modernist movements at the beginning of the 20th century, such as cubism, fauvism or German expressionism, Orchard embeds contemporary narratives into figurative painting history while raising questions about the representation of the female body.

Danielle Orchard (b. 1985 in Michigan City, IN) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a MFA from Hunter College, New York. Orchard has exhibited in the United States and internationally including exhibitions at D.C Moore Gallery, New York, The Journal, New York and V1, Copenhagen Denmark. Among others, her work has been reviewed in The New Yorker and The New York Times.