Jesse Chapman (b. 1974) is an American painter who lives and works in upstate New York. He earned his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2003 and has had solo shows at Marianne Boesky Gallery and Algus Greenspon in New York and at Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago. His paintings stage dreamlike, deeply perspectival spaces with dramatic light, where ambiguous figures perform rituals and familiar objects, stripped of context, become open symbols.
Jesse Chapman (b. 1974, Richland, Washington, USA) is an American painter who lives and works in upstate New York. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received his BFA, and earned his MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2003, the same year he received Yale’s Phelps Berdan Memorial Award. His paintings present recognisable objects and iconography with little context, so that they function as gestures or open symbols. He often builds dream-like, deeply perspectival spaces with dramatic contrasts of light, in which ambiguous figures take part in rituals between the living and the non-living. In some series he has explored negative space, using rectangular, void-like openings to create depth and draw the viewer into the picture. Chapman has had solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery and Algus Greenspon in New York and at Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, and in 2011 showed alongside David Scanavino in “The Void is Not Empty” at Marianne Boesky Gallery. His work has also been included in group exhibitions such as “Linkage: Artists Select Artists” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2009) and “New Mirrors” at Exit Art, New York (2010). The painting “The Play” (2006), oil on canvas, offered by TUMO Gallery, is an example of his enigmatic, staged figurative scenes of the mid-2000s.
