New York—Lévy Gorvy Dayan is delighted to present a solo booth of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Jenna Gribbon at TEFAF New York. Gribbon’s small-format works function diaristically—portraying intimate scenes from her daily life. The cycle of paintings debuting at TEFAF represent Gribbon’s wife and frequent subject, the musician Mackenzie Scott, seen from behind in lush natural settings across the United States—from the woods of Fire Island, New York, to the lakes of Tennessee, to the wilds of Georgia, and the canyons of New Mexico. With these compositions, Gribbon engages the symbol of the Rückenfigur, or turned figure, of Romanticism, made renowned by Caspar David Friedrich. Her positioning of Mackenzie invites the viewer to experience the subject’s perspective of the beheld landscape, while simultaneously withholding what she sees. Gribbon’s pastoral vistas also gesture toward her longstanding interest in Impressionism. Here, she emphasizes the interplay of light and color—while enhancing her tones to create an effect of surreality in the dappled sunlight streaming through flora or glinting off of open water. In Into the irises (2026), deftly articulated leaves and petals give way to an abstractly rendered foreground, while in In pursuit of a Crossville fish (2026), detailed ripples expand to broad strokes of vibrant pigment. As Gribbon created these paintings, the couple was also confronting the grief and loss of Mackenzie’s father, who passed away earlier this year. While Gribbon’s project is based on the reciprocal, entwined gaze and the challenge of observing someone in close proximity over time—here, the artist’s small remove from her wife intimately reflects the distance and solitude created by grief. Personally felt, her new paintings tenderly represent visions of a loved one on a journey of mourning, while encompassing the essences of companionship, nature, and mortality.

ABOUT ARTISTS : Jenna Gribbon

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Jenna Gribbon’s figurative canvases present poignant, uncanny scenes of everyday life while challenging art-historical conventions of the gaze. Upending the tropes—such as the artist-muse relationship—she reckons both with inherited artistic approaches and with the patrilineage of her medium. Gribbon reconceives the act of looking as a mutual one, marked by empathy and shared gratification. Utilizing the alla prima technique with a precise and animated hand, she offers unguarded glimpses into her life with her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott, as well as her young son and circle of friends. She often depicts moments that push the limits of public and private, agency and consent, and exhibition and exploitation. Painting with an acute awareness of the viewer, Gribbon plays with the voyeuristic impulse while bringing visibility to expressions of sapphic love. Born in 1978 in Knoxville, Gribbon studied painting at the University of Georgia (2001) and received her MFA from Hunter College (2019). Her work will be the subject of a major solo survey at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (late 2026). Her paintings have also been presented in exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley (2024–25, traveling and presented by the Shah Garg Foundation); Palazzo Barberini, Rome (2024, presented by the Aïshti Foundation); FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023–24); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2022–23); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022); Frick Museum, New York (2021); Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg, Germany (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida (2020); and the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2019), among many others. Her paintings reside in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Honolulu Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands; New Orleans Museum of Art; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Brooklyn Museum, New York; and MAMCO – Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva. Gribbon lives and works in Brooklyn.

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