Jess: A Dialogue of Presences
The Drawing Center, February - May, 2027
Guest Curators: Gary Garrels and Allegra Pesenti
Jess, a San Francisco-based artist who used only his first name, was a singular
artist, working at the edge of the mainstream. His work developed independently of
any movement or group of artists during a career that spanned over fifty years, and
included paintings, drawings, prints, and books, and texts and poems. His most
persistent focus though, was collage-which he called "paste-ups"-and works on
paper. The proposed exhibition will be the first comprehensive selection of his
paste-ups and works on paper since 1984 and the first substantial exhibition since
the retrospective at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1993 (which traveled
to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art
in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Fine Art in
Boston). The relationship between sketching and drawing and the paste-ups will be
examined in this exhibition for the first time.
Born in 1923 in Long Beach, California, Jess lived and worked in the San Francisco
Bay Area from 1949 until his death in 2004. He studied chemistry at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena and received a B.S. there in 1948, although for
several years he had been making paintings, watercolors, and drawings on the
side. Working after graduation as a chemist on the atomic defense program at the
Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington, he had an apocalyptic dream that the world was going to be completely destroyed by 1975. Traumatized,
in 1949 he left his job and moved to the Bay Area to become an artist.
The title of the exhibition comes from a description that Jess gave to his work:
"Everything in the world has a certain quality or spiritual presence, any simple
object or image. And when you put them together, a kind of dialogue or story
develops. Not a narrative, but more of a dialogue of presences." Spirituality and
mysticism permeate his work, informed by a wide range of influences including
fairy tales, children's books, folklore, the occult, Egyptian and Greek mythology, Art
Nouveau, Victorian imagery, and the history of art. He worked from an archive of
images, developed over years of collecting and clipping source material and filed
according to subject.
This exhibition will include slightly more than 100 objects including paste-ups and
related works on paper from the early 1950s through the 1990s when Jess ceased
to actively work. The exhibition will be organized into four sections. First will be the
early works from the 1950s which often included language as well as images. The
next section will present the complex, multi-image works often at grand scale
which were initiated in the 1960s and continued over the next three decades,
including all four of the large works dedicated to the four seasons. The third section
will focus on his great masterwork-the Narkissos-which began as a small
drawing in 1959 and concluded in 1991 with a monumental paste-up composed
entirely of cut pencil drawings. All the works related to this seminal object will be
presented along with several other works which allude to mythology. A final
section will present a diverse array of Jess's books and publications, including a
group of his iconic Tricky Cad comic books.
Jess described the Narkissos, one of the artist's last works, as "seeking finally to
maintain intense homoeros unprofaned, sensuous, joyful and fearful." Jess lived
openly as a gay man, and this exhibition will also explore this element of his identity
in the context of the life that he and his partner, the poet Robert Duncan created.
For more than three decades, their household was a center of bohemian life in San
Francisco, mixing artists, poets, writers and creative people of all types. The
openness and fluidity of their lives permeates Jess' work, making it ever more
approachable.
The exhibition is co-curated by Gary Garrels and Allegra Pesenti. It will be
accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog featuring essays by the curators.
