Other artists commit to tradition, including Jennifer May Reiland, who draws with a vengeance. Her exquisite bird’s-eye-view tableau “Encierros” depicts the dense activity radiating from a bloody bullfight.
Her paintings engage playfully and profoundly with questions of faith, with eros and the human body, with the myths and legends of Texas colonial history.
About
Jennifer May Reiland works between New York City and Palma de Mallorca. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (NYC), Open Sessions at The Drawing Center (NYC), Queens Museum (NYC), and the Fondation des États-Unis at Cité Universitaire (Paris).
She has shown her work internationally, including at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Drawing Center, and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin. She has had solo shows at Galeria Enrique Guerrero (Mexico City) and at Lawndale Art Center (Houston).
Her practice is primarily based in drawing. She creates narratives originating in historical research which explore themes of apocalypse, martyrdom, and erotic obsession. Her work is inspired by the arts of Middle Ages, particularly miniatures created by artisans as objects of personal devotion for particular patrons. Like these artisans, her work incorporates spiritual, historical, and personal themes, often juxtaposing the sacred and the profane, the vulgar and the sublime, the contemporary and the ancient.
You can contact her at studio@jennifermayreiland.com.
Her pictures of women are not so much documentary portraits as gestures of a sort of imaginative empathy, where historical facts and artistic interpretations collide.
Her art, which mixes heavy religious motifs with a sweet, homemade, sketchbook quality, is not the work of a true believer, but neither can it be described as skeptical or materialist. Her imagination is locked on overdrive, with a tone suspended somewhere between desire and doubt, myth and history, truth and reconciliation.