Jessie Homer French
Artworks
Exhibitions
Projects
Biography
Jessie Homer French was born in New York in 1940. She currently lives and works in Mountain Center, California, US.
A self-taught artist, her paintings emerge from a continuous analysis of places surrounding her and reveal the artist’s personal and profound attitude to a local and transient type of composition. Through a simplified language - only apparently naive, flat colours and calm brushstrokes - Homer French treats with delicate care existential issues related to death, nature and rural life. In her work, humanity appears a toxic intruder in a melancholic nature, and yet, even the paintings with the darkest subjects feature a formal vitality capable of giving extraordinary immediacy to her bittersweet and anti-pastoral compositions, in which creation and destruction coexist with exemplary candour.
Solo exhibitions include: West Coast, MASSIMODECARLO, London, UK (2021); Chernobyl, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA, US (2020); Paintings 1978-2018, Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin, IE (2019); American Pastoral, Art Basel Hong Kong, HK (2018); Mapestries, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, US (2015).
Group exhibitions include: Materia Medica, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA, US (2020); Life Still, CLEARING, New York, NY, US (2020); Eighty at Eighty: Recent Gifts to the Permanent Collection, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA, US (2018); Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA, US.
French’s work is included in the collections of the Palm Springs Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.