Jessie Makinson

Lyles & King is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition of London-based artist Jessie Makinson (b. 1985), Dangerous Pleasing.

Teasing threads from art history and literature, Jessie Makinson readdresses a patriarchal past from a female perspective. Plucking themes and narratives from historical precedent, she creates a bold new context for the motifs she selects. Vivid colors describe tense, erotic scenes in which women are dangerous active participants, not passive permission givers. Makinson’s characters practice rituals, they embrace, plot and conspire. They hold sexual power and disrupt expectations, inhabiting a universe that surprises, delights and tests its audience.

To begin an artwork, Makinson employs a compositional strategy of underpainting. Working intuitively, she designs a pattern of arbitrary shapes across the surface of her canvas. Playfully transforming these initial designs, Makinson makes discoveries within them. Using her creative imagination, she finds both character and composition within these chance outlines. Referencing diverse historical and literary sources, she enjoys unlikely interactions.

Makinson robs history, literature and contemporary culture of the aspects that most intrigue her. She takes inspiration from folklore, from 17th and 18th-century erotica, from ecofeminist writing, from Flemish kitchen scenes and early Renaissance altarpieces. Like a medieval-style storyteller, Makinson creates new versions of the characters and storylines she selects. Willfully misunderstanding her source materials, she casts off patriarchal overtones and substitutes men for women.

Narrative unfolds through a series of individual tableau. Makinson’s characters seem motivated by jealousy, narcissism, and desire. Her paintings bring to mind conspiracies and betrayals, invoking plot lines that could equally have been plucked from Tudor England or Instagram stories. In ‘Giant Meddlers’ (2020), a woman bathes as a coven of allies gather around, the group uneasy, as if interrupted practicing some mysterious forbidden ritual. To their left, a horned creature protectively embraces another as she bites nervously on her shoulder. They look anxiously outside the picture frame at a threat we are left to imagine.

The power of these works lies in this absence of certainty. Makinson paints an abyss into which the viewer pours their own fears, fantasies, and desires. In the unstable space Makinson creates, the thin membrane between reality and fiction has become permeable. Within her widely syncretic imagination, all things are happening at once. Present and past, truth and fake, woman and beast intermingle without hierarchy. Makinson creates an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and with it a fantastic, surreal and chaotic reassessment of all human consciousness.

—Kate Neave

Jessie Makinson (b.1985, London) has had recent solo exhibitions at Fabian Lang, Zürich, CH, and Galería OMR, Mexico City, MX. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions including No Patience for Monuments at Perrotin, Seoul, KR (2019); In the Company Of, curated by Katy Hessel at T.J. Boulting, London, UK (2018); Dead Eden at Lyles & King, New York, US (2018); BioPeversity at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2018); Formal Encounters at Nicodim Gallery, Bucharest, HU (2018); Breaking Shells, curated by Justine Do Espirito Santo at The Koppel Room, London, UK (2018); and Fake French at Roman Road, London, UK (2016). Upcoming exhibitions include I See You at Victoria Miro, London, UK, and Kunstverein Dresden. She lives and works in London.