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Jocelyn Hobbie

“Hobbie’s technical prowess…her ability to combine scintillating, clashing designs—draping them together into backgrounds, pillows, and skirts—is enviable, and aids in shielding these elegantly aloof figures against our desire to better know them. The artist crystallizes the kind of dissatisfaction that tends to linger and then lift during mundane routines . . . like, perhaps, living. Her beautiful girls reveal a contemporary condition that is felt all too often, a twenty-first-century limbo that no amount of overstimulation could break.” --Kaitlyn A. Kramer, Artforum

 

For over 20 years, Jocelyn Hobbie has painted the figure. From her earlier dream-like narratives to her most recent paintings of flawlessly articulated women, Hobbie has fused themes of mortality, eroticism and a persistent disaffection with contemporary life. Echoing styles as divergent as the expressive figuration of New Objectivity and the layered patterning of Ukiyo-e, Hobbie hones a formal inventiveness in which neoclassical figures are depicted amid bold patterning and vivid floral settings. Her heightened naturalism and enhanced degree of saturated color reveal an uneasy relationship to realism and firmly root these striking paintings in the age of post abstraction.