Few young artists in Denver have received more early-career plaudits than Jenny Morgan, a 2003 star graduate of the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design.
Besides being accepted for representation by one of Denver’s more important commercial art spaces, she had a work selected in a competition this year at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
As impressive as these accomplishments are, it is easy to wonder after seeing her soon-to-close solo exhibition at the Plus Gallery if it all has been too much, too soon.
There is no doubt that Morgan is a promising artist with abundant talent, but her work still needs considerable development and and maturation.
Influenced by the neo-figurative work of Philip Pearlstein and others, Morgan has created a deliberate, mannered style that can seem stiff and even a bit forced at times.
To set her works apart, she relies on a series of devices – what critics might label gimmicks – beginning with her tight cropping, the constant depiction of only sections of figures without,, oddly enough, any portrayals of faces, breasts or genitalia.
In some of the works, she divides the composition into multiple canvases, sometimes with deliberately exaggerated effects, as in “The Virgin,” which consists of three long, narrow panels. Whether this approach adds or detracts from the work’s overall effectiveness is open to question.
Borrowing from the old masters who loved to show off their painterly virtuosity with depictions of billowing fabrics, all of her canvaes include folded, twisted and rippled bedsheets, which she realizes with mixed degrees of technical success.
Many of these ideas are interesting, but used over and over again they quickly begin to lose their effectiveness.
Morgan holds the seeds of her success, but she needs to learn how to sow them in ways that lead to fresh, imaginative results. There’s every reason to believe she will.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
