‘Janet Cooling: 1978 -1982’ at Jack Hanley Gallery
Janet Cooling: 1978-1982
May 31 – July 3, 2019
Jack Hanley Gallery, New York
Opening reception Friday, May 31, 6-8pm
‘Janet Cooling’s paintings made between 1978 and 1982 were painted a decade after Stonewall, in the first years of the AIDS crisis, and during the last major nuclear scares of the Cold War. In the drawings and paintings from this period, Cooling constructs apocalyptic narratives in which sibylline symbols stand in for deeply personal memories and desires amplified to cosmological scale and importance. Suburban tract houses and nuclear plants remembered from Cooling’s childhood in South Orange, New Jersey intermingle with big-haired fashion models and roaming wildlife appropriated from magazines. Elsewhere, women couple erotically in sublime landscapes while other figures are engulfed by burning skyscrapers, fields of lightning, hovering planets, and writhing snakes. Replete with fractured and illogically scaled motifs, the feverish drawings and paintings from this period are acridly pigmented landscapes of disaster and desire. …’
Read the full press release about Janet Cooling: 1978 -1982