Featured Artist: Jennifer Li

Jennifer Li is presenting more than ten significant figurative works which demonstrate her deeply singular style. Her paintngs are intellectually and psychologically compelling. Her subject matter of women or children are in scenes that invite recognition and contemplation. The narrative quality of Li’s work is enriched by a subtle sense of irony or humor at play. She wisely leaves it to the viewer’s imagination to finish interpreting the story. There is another dimension to her work also on exhibit here - paintings that are pure imagination and fantasy.

Li’s paintings are usually small, highly finished, and are surprising for their unexpected color combinations. Her precise handling of detail and easy fluency of the brush is remarkable and is reminiscent of the German Renaissance Masters. The luminous clarity of her painting technique evolved from her study of the varnish mediums of the Dutch Golden Age. Li’s work is unusual for combining a distinctive artistic vision with a technique that is rarely mastered by contemporary painters. That is the power behind these unique paintings.

Jennifer Li is originally from Northern California. After majoring in literature and philosophy at Bennington and Sarah Lawrence, she studied painting for over twelve years at the Art Students League of New York under distinguished realist painters Harvey Dinnerstein and Frank Mason. She has been painting professionally since 1990. Her works have been enthusiastically received by both critics and collectors. Her paintings have been described in The New York Times as "straightforwardly beautiful" with "an element of the weird." Her subject matter, for the most part, is executed out of her own imagination. Li has exhibited her work in galleries in Calgary, California, Indiana, New York City, and Montana including the Holter Museum in Helena, MT.

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SYLVAN GALLERY