It was at Johansson Projects last fall that I first saw and fell in love with Jennie Ottinger's work, and now she's back at the gallery again with a gobsmacker of a new show. While her paintings often have something of a vintage feel to them, at least in her choice of subject matter, she has gone one step further and themed this entire show around classic literature, excerpting scenes from books like Madame Bovary, Of Mice and Men, Gravity's Rainbow, and many more. Her sparse painting style with its isolated blocks of color and unfinished details is a natural fit for the moments she chooses to illustrate: funerals, court hearings, soldiers at war. I like that she doesn't necessarily paint the most famous parts of the books either, and instead the images acquire a sort of universality only heightened if like me you've read only a smattering of the Great Novels. In addition to her paintings Ottinger has also repurposed a series of hardbacks, wrapping them in painted jackets and excavating the pages so to insert her own blunt, laugh-out-loud synopses of the stories. I particularly recommend her version of Orlando, and of Moby-Dick (only three pages long!). Further hilarity ensues on one wall of the gallery where Ottinger has grouped stacks of books by theme. If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say Come Sit By Me was one of my favorites, consisting of Vanity Fair, Medea, and of course The Portable Dorothy Parker. Wicked.
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