Jasmine Gregory approaches painting as a spatial practice, maneuvering tightly rendered canvases into sprawling sculptural tableaux. Her works appropriate advertisements for wealth management firms and luxury watch companies, with their glossy photographic surfaces rendered by hand in oil. The advertisements’ coy use of second-person address (“You never really own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation”) become satirical provocations to consider questions of patrimony and preservation. Commingling paintings with wine bottles, vitrines, plastic bags, tinsel, and studio refuse—to name a few materials in her repertoire—she weaves scenarios whose ambiguous drama reflects the difficulty of digesting, and producing within, hyper-saturated cultural landscapes.
Who Wants to Die for Glamour, Gregory’s first institutional exhibition in the US, features a focused selection of new works including a large-scale, site-specific installation. Extending her interest in the material histories of image-making and display, the exhibition considers transparency, fragmentation, and dissolution in relation to both artistic production and racial capitalism.
Jasmine Gregory (American, b. 1987) was born in Washington, D.C. and currently lives and works in Zurich. She holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an MFA from Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich. Her work was the subject of a recent solo exhibition at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and she has held solo exhibitions at Karma International, Zurich; Martina Simeti, Milan; Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna; King’s Leap, New York; and Istituto Svizzero, Milan. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues including Le Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg; and Kunsthalle Zürich. Her work appears in publications such as Artforum, Flash Art, and Mousse. As a representative of Black Artists and Cultural Workers in Switzerland, she participated in a conversation titled “Reimagining the Museum, Open Letters and a Decolonial Framework” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2020.
Organized by Jody Graf, Assistant Curator
