Los Angeles, California.- The Katherine Cone Gallery is pleased to present “Commentary and Dissent”, an exhibition of works by artist Jill Greenberg, on view at the gallery from January 7th through February 4th. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, January 7th , from 6-9 p.m. Despite Greenberg’s known disdain for patriarchal constructs, the show’s title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to her patrilineal history. Her husband’s grandmother was the managing editor of “Commentary” when it was still progressive, and her father-in-law was a contributor to “Dissent.” The images in this exhibition aggressively reassert the power of the image to confront and attack the viewer, and affirm Greenberg’s practice as a transgressive, yet Pop, artist. The works refer back her days at Rhode Island School of Design, where she confronted viewers with socio-scopic commentary on the multiple iterations of power relations.
Greenberg’s unique lighting approach has become a visual meme, imitated everywhere, and her ability to record emotion and intense connection with the subject is recognized in her portraits of animals and children. “Commentary and Dissent” comprises several parallel series and related works. The largest project represented is “everyonehateseveryone”. Whereas some of Greenberg’s previous series showed animals to have human personalities, these exhibit people behaving like animals. The graphic figure studies are aggressively treated in post-production, destroying the boundary between painting and photography. While many painters use photographs as reference, painting photorealistically, she paints atop the image itself, making the photograph appear painting-like. The skin tones are reworked and colorations are added with a deft skill, which evinces the 22 years she has utilized digital manipulation. The scenes in the photographs all actually occurred as photographed. Ms. Greenberg digitally hand painted on these works with her stylus, in Photoshop, only to enhance the surface qualities, not to fabricate actions.
Greenberg was born in Montreal, Quebec, and grew up in a suburb of Detroit. She graduated with honors in 1989 from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Photography and moved to New York City to pursue a career in photography. Greenberg moved to Los Angeles in 2000 where she met her husband Robert. In 2007 Greenberg was selected by French Photo Magazine for their 40th anniversary issue to represent one of the 40 most important photographers. She has done commercial work for corporations such as Philip Morris, Microsoft, Polaroid, Dreamworks, Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, MGM, Disney, Fox, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Smirnoff, MTV, Warner Bros., Sony Music, and Atlantic Records. Her photos have appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Wired, Fast Company, Entertainment Weekly and numerous other publications. Celebrities and CEOs who have used her head shots and portraits include Clint Eastwood, Glenn Close, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Jenkins.
Her artwork has been featured in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New Republic and several other publications. Her monkey series has been purchased by art collectors worldwide. Her work has been shown at CLAMPART in New York and Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles. In addition, her artwork has been exhibited in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Paris, France; Adelaide, Australia; San Francisco; Chicago; and various other cities. Greenberg is credited by some within the commercial photography industry as having produced several unique styles that have since been emulated by other photographers. “Like LaChapelle and Avedon, Jill has pioneered a new style of photography, and her impact can be seen throughout the entertainment industry”, the creative director of a Los Angeles creative agency told Brief magazine, with the publication itself characterizing her work as employing “distinctive ethereal backlighting.” A president of NBC Entertainment Marketing who has employed Greenberg on a number of occasions due to what he terms her “distinct and innovative aesthetic” observed that “many other photographers follow her lead.” Greenberg herself has acknowledged having made particular use of digital post production, adapting the nickname “The Manipulator” early in her career due in part to her relatively early adoption of Photoshop, a product she has used since its release in 1990.
Nonetheless, she told an interviewer in 2011 that some of what her fans believe to be post production is instead the result of close attention to lighting, merely supplemented with minor “flourishes” afterwards. Greenberg suggested in a 1998 New York Times article on female gamers that her affinity for technology came from her mother: “My mom was a math buff and a science major in college. … In 1964, she became a COBOL programmer and helped support my father through med school. She used to write programs on keypunch cards for mainframes.”
The Katherine Cone Gallery is a contemporary fine art gallery located at 2673 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles. The gallery has a particularly sharp focus on contemporary art of all types and media, and represents artists including Sean Cheetham, Jill Greenberg, Benjamin Bryce Kelley, Miles “Mac” MacGregor, Rose Masterpol, Vanessa Prager, Samuel Stabler, Anthony Michael Sneed. Visit the gallery’s website at … http://www.katherineconegallery.com