An early Jenny Morgan triptych

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.

Nothing against NY, but this piece by Travis Egedy is a recent favorite

A couple of years ago I was asked to critique the students over at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, something I often get asked to do and enjoy very much, particularly since so many of our most succesful and talented artists graduated from there. One of the students who caught my eye that day was Travis Egedy, I was familiar with his work and had included a painting of his (titled..."Football is like so gay") in our group exhibition of emerging artists "The Young Guns" for our 5th anniversary show. He was doing a lot of works on paper, kind of honing a style that was similar to his paintings but much more immediate and with a keen sensibility towards the current wave of hipster art and anything-goes approach. The works felt fresh and vibrant to me, and this one in particular resonated deeply. Travis related how he was just thinking about the NY art scene and how you here so much about having to be there and that the trend is to grind through the young artists, turn and burn them, etc....and that he just felt like it was all so shitty from the perspective of being in art school in Denver. I of course feel more or less the same way about running a contemporary gallery in Denver, constantly having to grapple with how to make artists seem relevant who haven't been through the NYC grind. And so "Fuck NY" really resonates with me and is a piece I adore. We now have a bunch of Travis' works on paper in our inventory at Plus, there are quite a few gems but as FNY says, you have to be huge somewhere else to get people around here to pay money for them.

Recent drawings by Drew Englander

I bought two drawings by Drew Englander last Friday, they are from the exhibition "Drawrings 2" at my favorite hipster gallery Rhinoceropolis. Englander is a student at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver, one of the best institutions in the region for finding decent new artists (a place that will likely crop up in this blog many times). I like Drew's surreal style and loose approach, as well as the bursts of color on otherwise traditional line drawings. The works are intended to be tacked to the wall with the remaining image drawn straight onto the wall by the artist at certain points along the border. I decided to purchase two of the works from this show, from a group of maybe 10 or so. These are a small scale, right around letter-page paper size though some were larger and some were smaller and a couple were on a blue-ish toned paper. I am always amazed that more works like this (at exhibitions like those at Rhinoceropolis) are not more widely purchased though the venue doesn't always help when it comes to sales. There does seem to be a disconnect in Denver, however, with where people might purchase some of the younger, edgier talent, if they are buying it at all. My preference is to support the truly budding talent at this level, I feel it really makes a difference to the artists at this point in their careers, not to mention that the work is great (there were many other worthwhile pieces from the same show).