Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, in Jenna Gribbon’s vibrant and intrusive aesthetic, the gaze becomes both subject and accomplice. Her canvases seem to discreetly accuse you of being exactly what you are: an insatiable voyeur, caught in the delicious contradiction of contemplating what was not meant to be seen. Her oil paintings, with their lush hues and compositions that invite then repel us, are the perfect antidote to our era of all-seeing, where intimacy has become currency on the social media market.
Jenna Gribbon, an American artist born in 1978 in Tennessee and now working in Brooklyn, is a painter who understands that true power lies in tension. She masters the space between revelation and concealment, between invitation and accusation. Gribbon’s work focuses mainly on her partner (now her wife), musician Mackenzie Scott, professionally known as Torres, and their son Silas. In her recent paintings, this documented intimacy becomes a contested territory between the artist, the subject, and the viewer. Gribbon is not naive about the power dynamics inherent in figurative painting. She knows full well that we are all voyeurs when we contemplate art, and she exploits this vulnerability with surgical precision.
Susan Sontag, in her essential essay “On Photography,” reminds us that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing being photographed” [1]. Gribbon transcends this notion by forcing us to reflect on our own complicity in the act of observation. Her fluorescent pink nipples, now an iconic visual signature, are not simply a stylistic provocation; they represent an alarm signal, a reminder that the body you are looking at belongs to a real, living, breathing person. As she herself explained: “I wanted to make the viewer a little uncomfortable, a little self-aware” [2]. It’s not just about nudity; it’s about consent, complicity, and awareness.
In the tradition of figurative painting, Gribbon fits within a lineage of disruptors. Think of Édouard Manet and his “Luncheon on the Grass,” a work that scandalized 19th-century Paris not because of its nudity (nudes were common currency) but because the nude woman looks directly at the viewer, without shame or apology. Gribbon pushes this confrontation further by creating what I would call an “aesthetic of empowerment.” She is essentially telling us: “Yes, you are looking, and I know you are looking, and the person you are looking at also knows you are looking.”
Oscar Wilde, that great art theorist and master of provocation, wrote in his preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” that “all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who dive beneath the surface do so at their own risk” [3]. Gribbon’s works are precisely this kind of dangerous terrain. Their surface is seductive, with impeccable alla prima technique, rich palette, intimate compositions, but dive beneath that surface and you will find yourself confronted with uncomfortable questions about power, desire, and representation.
In “Examinationscape” (2021), for example, Gribbon paints Scott lying down, observed, under harsh artificial light. The scene evokes a medical examination, a photoshoot, or perhaps an interrogation. The viewer is placed in the ambiguous position of the examiner. Are we caregivers, lovers, or intruders? This deliberate ambiguity is at the heart of Gribbon’s message. She draws us in with the promise of intimacy, then confronts us with our own intrusion.
Gribbon is not the first to explore this dynamic, of course. As Virginia Woolf pointed out in her essay “A Room of One’s Own”, “for most of history, ‘Anonymous’ was a woman” [4]. Women have long been the silent subjects of art, rarely its recognized creators. Gribbon overturns this paradigm with quiet confidence. Not only does she create, but she documents her own queer life with an uncompromising frankness that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.
What truly distinguishes Gribbon’s work is her sharp awareness of the art history she inherits and simultaneously subverts. In an interview, she admitted: “I am so steeped in the history of how white men have translated ideas and images into painting that I can never consider a Eurocentric masculine approach to painting as anything other than just painting” [5]. This clear acknowledgment of her own artistic training informs her subtle rebellion against these traditions.
Let us take a moment to consider the cinematography of Claire Denis, this French filmmaker whose work often explores dynamics of power, desire, and the body. In films like “Beau Travail” (1999), Denis uses the camera to examine male bodies with an intensity usually reserved for female subjects in traditional cinema. This inversion of the gaze is similar to what Gribbon does in her painting. As film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote in her groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the cinematic gaze is “masculine” in its very structure [6]. Denis, like Gribbon, reprograms this gaze to create something new and unsettling.
What I like most about Gribbon’s work is perhaps her ability to navigate contradictions. She creates works that are both political and deeply personal, theoretical and visceral, historically aware and resolutely contemporary. Her paintings are beautiful, yes, but of a beauty that makes you question your own desire for beauty. It is a beauty that traps, that questions, that refuses to be simply consumed.
Lotte Laserstein, this German-Swedish painter too long overlooked, constitutes an important precedent for Gribbon. In the 1920s and 1930s, Laserstein painted her muse and partner, Traute Rose, in a way that rejected traditional objectification. In works like “In My Studio” (1928), Laserstein portrays herself painting Rose nude, thus creating a meta-commentary on the act of representation itself. Gribbon continues this tradition in works like “Me looking at her looking at me” (2018), which explicitly expose the reciprocity of the gaze in the artist-muse relationship.
The parallels with Nan Goldin’s photography are also evident. Like Goldin, Gribbon documents her intimate life and relationships with disarming frankness. But whereas Goldin’s photographs have a raw, almost journalistic quality, Gribbon’s paintings are more deliberately constructed, more consciously situated within the pictorial tradition they seek to subvert. If Goldin gives us a seemingly unfiltered access, Gribbon constantly reminds us that all access is negotiated, mediated, and complex.
In her most recent works, Gribbon explores the relationship with her son Silas, creating what she herself calls a “psychedelic” and “floating” exploration of motherhood. These paintings analyze how a parent can see aspects of themselves reflected in their child, blurring the boundaries between distinct identities. “The experience of seeing oneself, outside of oneself, in another human being completely separate, with their own world, makes you evaluate what is important to you and what is meaningful to share,” she explains [7]. This new direction represents a fascinating evolution of her ongoing exploration of the dynamics of gaze and representation.
Enough theory. Let’s talk technique. Gribbon is a virtuoso, period. Her mastery of alla prima painting, this technique where layers of paint are applied while previous ones are still wet, enables her to capture moments with a freshness and immediacy that beautifully contrast with the potential heaviness of her themes. Her brushstrokes are confident, expressive, sensual. She knows when to be precise and when to let the paint breathe and flow. It’s the kind of technical mastery that makes purists grit their teeth and provocateurs smile.
And then there is her palette. Her colors are rich, luscious, surprisingly contemporary despite their debt to tradition. Vibrant pinks and oranges, electric blues, acidic yellows, Gribbon uses color not simply to render reality but to transform it, to signal that we are in a constructed, mediated space. These chromatic choices are another way she reminds us that we are looking at a painting, a construction, an act of translation rather than a transparent window onto reality.
Gribbon’s work is particularly relevant in our age of hypervisibility, where the boundaries between public and private are constantly eroded. In a world where every intimate moment can be shared, liked, and monetized, her paintings pose urgent questions: What does it mean to look and be looked at? How does consent function in the digital age? What is it like to be simultaneously subject and creator?
Susan Sontag wrote that “collecting photographs is collecting the world” [8]. I would say that looking at Gribbon’s paintings is to be invited into a world, but a world that questions you as much as you question it. It is contested territory, a space of negotiation rather than mere consumption.
What makes Gribbon’s work resonate so deeply is her ability to make the political personal and the personal political. She takes the big abstract questions of representation, power, and desire, and grounds them in the intimate details of her own life, a life shared with her wife, her son, her friends. It is this specificity that gives her work its power. As Audre Lorde wrote, “it is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences” [9]. Gribbon’s work recognizes, accepts, and celebrates those differences, while acknowledging the power structures that seek to erase or exploit them.
So the next time you find yourself facing a Gribbon painting, take a moment to consider your own position as a viewer. Acknowledge the privilege and responsibility that come with the act of looking. And perhaps, just perhaps, allow yourself to feel a bit uncomfortable. After all, as Gribbon reminds us, it is in this discomfort that the possibility of a true encounter resides, with art, with the other, and ultimately, with ourselves.
- Sontag, Susan. “On Photography”, Christian Bourgois Editions, 1979.
- Gribbon, Jenna. Interview with Barry N. Neuman, WhiteHot Magazine, January 2018.
- Wilde, Oscar. “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, preface, 1891.
- Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own”, 10/18 Editions, 1992.
- Gribbon, Jenna. Interview with Barry N. Neuman, WhiteHot Magazine, January 2018.
- Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen, 1975.
- Gribbon, Jenna. Interview with Maxine Wally, W Magazine, July 2024.
- Sontag, Susan. “On Photography”, Christian Bourgois Editions, 1979.
- Lorde, Audre. “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, Crossing Press, 1984.
