The story of Jenny Morgan and our gallery is an astonishing one that we often relate to friends and prospctive clients alike with great fervor, there really has been no other artist that has hit such tremendous personal and career notes in a small time-span. The short version is that she served as our very first intern at the gallery years ago when she was in her final year at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. Jenny was a great intern, though at that time responsibilities didn't extend much beyond cleaning the floor, labeling postcards and serving bar at the openings. Though Jenny was studying painting, she never revealed her work to us during her internship but did invite us to the graduation show at RMCAD where she had a piece on view. Because she was such a delight and always did what we asked of her, we decided to support her show and attended the opening. The painting she had on view was obviously the standout of the show, it was a triptych that had three tightly cropped depictions of a naked female body in a state of flow, with fabric swirling through the body, each panel with a different color-tone referencing various emotional states. She had a precise technique but the cropping and color selections made the piece distinctly contemporary. I liked it enough to ask her to bring it to the gallery and see what might happen, it wasn't necessarily a genre that I would see us getting into but it seemed very appealing with just the right edge we were looking for. Some months later Jenny invited us to her first exhibition at Pirate, a local co-op that long held one of the best reputations in town (thanks to leadership by local legend Phil Bender and a disarmingly good array of talent over the years). It was an honor that Jenny was accepted into Pirate, and of course we wanted to support her first show. The best part was that I was indeed suprised by what she had on view, the exhibition showed great depth and intrigue and the contemporary nature we had assumed she was encompassing was in full view. I was very taken in particular by this "Belly" triptych, it seemed like such an unusual choice for a young artist and promoted a dichotomy in content that I felt was very strong, both repelant yet divine at the same time. The piece was all of $250 and I decided to snatch it up the night of the opening. Since that time so much has transpired with Jenny's career, she has become one of the top artists in our stable and there are many wonderful, exciting stories surrounding her rise in the Denver art scene and beyond, too many to be related here. She just graduated two weeks ago with a masters in painting from one of the best art schools in the country (NYC's SVA) and her work has alrady been secured by notable national collectors such as Howard Tullman and Norman Dubrow. Though she emerged as one of the most promising artists from Denver in the last ten years, she is really just now beginning her real career and time will tell if the magic of her early days will continue as she commences painting in her new Brooklyn studio. I for one am banking that it will.
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