A piece from Jasmine Gregory’s “Who Wants to Die for Glamour” exhibition at MoMA PS1. Photo credit: MoMa PS1/Arthur Pequin.
Sept. 5, 2024 By Shane O’Brien
MoMA PS1 will host the first institutional exhibition in the US by artist Jasmine Gregory, featuring a number of new works exploring the difficulties of creating art in modern-day society and themes of generational inheritance.
Gregory, who was born in Washington D.C. but lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland, is known for working satirically with abstracted notions of love and commodity and uses paintings, sculptures and installations to explore the tensions of artistic production in the present day.
Her “Who Wants to Die for Glamour” exhibition will debut at MoMA PS1 on Oct. 10 and runs until Feb. 17 next year, featuring a selection of new works, including a site-specific installation created for MoMA PS1.
The exhibition emphasizes Gregory’s spatial approach to painting, featuring works that showcase a high level of precision and attention to detail.
Gregory’s exhibition blends paintings with everyday items such as wine bottles, wire hangers, tinsel and studio refuse to create scenes that reflect the difficulty of creating art within the “hyper-saturated” cultural environment of modern-day society.
The exhibition also reflects Gregory’s interest in the material history of image-making and considers themes of transparency, fragmentation and dissolution in relation to artistic creation and racial capitalism.
The site-specific installation—a plexiglass vitrine suspended aloft from the gallery’s four corners—anchors the exhibition. Illuminated from within, it evokes a discarded trophy case whose prizes spill out into the space.
Since 2022, Gregory has incorporated ads from wealth management and luxury watch companies in her paintings, recreating their glossy look by hand. Her work challenges the messages of these advertisements by pairing their glossy imagery with monochrome canvases, with the stark contrast raising questions about the value placed on luxury.
Gregory has included two of these works in the Who Wants to Die for Glamour exhibition, provoking questions about the notion of inheritance.
“Investment Piece No. 7”, for example, is accompanied by the tagline, “You never really own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.”
The exhibition also includes a small photographic portrait of the artist and her mother taken in the the 1990s, which includes a watermark from Glamour Studios, where the portrait was shot. By including a watermark from the popular studio franchise, Gregory directly implicates herself in critiques of inheritance, ambition and class aspiration.
The title of the upcoming exhibition draws on a line from the 1974 John Waters film “Female Trouble”, in which the protagonist, ascendant performer Dawn Davenport, exclaims, “Who wants to die for art?” before firing a gun into the crowd of her nightclub act.
MoMA PS1, located at 22-25 Jackson Ave. in Long Island City, is open five days a week. It opens from 12-6 p.m. on Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays and from 12-8 p.m. on Saturdays.
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