Pieter Jennes

b. 1990, Mortsel, BE
Lives and works in Antwerp, BE

Belgian artist Pieter Jennes’ paintings feature creatures caught in motion and portrayed in a manner that verges on pastiche. The narrativity of his work is balanced by his painterly style, refined by mining a variety of art-historical references, notably the flat perspectives of Islamic miniatures, the satirical mode of Weimar-era artists like Georg Grosz, and the frontality of theater. His humans and animals, and the reductive landscapes they find themselves in, are made up of a panoply of patterns and textures that testify to his attunement to the tactility of painting. The primacy of somatic feeling is essential to his work, both in his richly colored, densely patterned surfaces, and in the moments of contact he represents between living beings. Jennes builds worlds that are both mundane and mystifying, rendering equal scenes as diverse as a man touching a woman’s pregnant belly, a human caught gripping a lion’s gaping maw, and snails squirming up a sunflower stalk.

Pieter Jennes (b. 1990, Mortsel, Belgium; lives and works in Antwerp, BE) studied painting at the Royal Academie of Fine Arts, Antwerp, as well as curatorial studies at The Ryoal Academie of Fine Arts & University of Gent. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions including Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp, BE; The White House Gallery, Lovenjoel, Belgium; CIAP, Hasselt, Belgium; and Public Gallery, London, UK.

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