Jenny Hager
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Apr 28
- 5 min read
Jenny Hager’s paintings come together through touch, time, and instinct. She works slowly, letting the surface shift until something starts to settle. The process is physical—scraping, taping, layering—sometimes precise, sometimes chaotic. Her images hold tension without trying to explain it. She draws from personal experience, but never in a direct or literal way. There’s often a push and pull between softness and sharp edges, between what’s seen and what stays underneath. Each painting feels like it’s still thinking, still changing. Hager isn’t trying to resolve anything—she stays with the uncertainty and lets the work find its own shape.
Q: Your work is soft but steady. What holds a painting together for you?
A: I had the privilege of art educators and mentors that embraced process, and I believe painting is an act of discovery. These educators not only taught me formal skills, but addressed the merits of the discomfort of finding oneself in an unrecognizable space. A painting is most engaging to me when it teeters at the edge of collapse, and I must rely on process, building the surface in areas, scraping in others until a moment emerges from the mess that excavates or exposes either the visceral, referential yet unnamable elements, or parts of an episode. Once this moment is revealed, the mess becomes representative of a fluid personal symbol system to build further upon. It is this promise of discovery and the desire to remain in a space that has a narrative but refuses categorization through language that keeps me working through uncertainty and mess.
Q: Painting for you is confrontation. What does that look like in practice?
A: Painting for me is confrontation. I, like too many women, have a history of trauma and bodily violation. Painting allows me to examine trauma and process its complexity, be it fear, abjectness, chaos, comfort, or the profundity of remaining in a vulnerable space. Experiencing and processing trauma is confrontational in itself, and through painting I hope to discover the uncanniness of such an experience. As this trauma has become less of a powerful injury and more of one narrative in a lifetime of many narratives, I feel my paintings are most successful when they present a space I liken to drifting on the double-edged sword of wonder.
Q: What draws you back to earlier works?
A: There are many reasons I revisit older paintings, but the most prevalent is that I was not able to arrive at a moment of intricacy, that the work has more to reveal. I will either be viewing my image library or have to pull paintings from storage for a collector or an exhibition (I store paintings unstretched in rolls, three or four paintings per roll), and in examining the work with a fresh eye, I have a sense of incompleteness, which differs from appearing “finished.” My process of painting is a dialogue, and as the surface becomes a palimpsest, I feel the painting is requesting a certain outcome founded in discovering liminal spaces and a degree of discomfort juxtaposed with beauty. In retrospectively viewing older paintings, I sometimes find that I pushed the painting as far along this path as I was able at the time, but subsequent painting has given me a fresh perspective and insight into understanding how to achieve a more robust representation of the painting’s antecedents. It is intuitive, and I build upon the language present rather than repaint.
Q: There’s a tension between softness and threat in your surfaces. What’s happening in that dynamic?
A: To navigate the world in a woman’s body unfortunately makes one intimately acquainted with threat. Thankfully I have aged out of harassment, but my twenty-year-old son is ethereally beautiful (and in the modeling industry), and I have witnessed him negotiate similar issues, reinforcing my belief that beauty is dangerous. I am also reminded of nature’s way of marking the most poisonous creatures with beautiful fluorescent colors—a warning.
It is through the process of applying paint and building a palimpsest that directs elements I allow to remain—organic ephemera that coalesce into form while simultaneously disintegrating. The sharpness is superimposed by taping at various stages of building the painting. Sometimes the taping is subsumed into structure, or alternatively it is the final layer, functioning as hard edges juxtaposed against ephemera or expressionist passages, a barrier or screen, protective frills, or a piercing threat. Most of my studio time is spent sitting at my painting table, absorbing and making drawings of the work in progress. Ultimately, the decisions of what to soften and what to allow to be aggressive rest upon where the elements of the painting coalesce. If I feel uncomfortable, my intuition has served me well.
Q: What role do myth and memory play in your practice?
A: Myth and memory play an important role in my work. My father introduced me to D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths at a very young age, and the wild illustrations and fantastical stories not only established my love of reading, but fueled vivid daydreams. I was an undiagnosed ADHD child (I now view ADHD as a creative superpower) and found myself alienated amongst my classmates and bored with school. I developed a love of science fiction and fantasy and would slip effortlessly into my own world where monsters were my constant companions.
We have all discovered at some point that monsters exist in the physical world, and through the process of therapy I came to understand the buffer and strength of residing in my own mythology and painting my history through these created worlds. I recognize that memory is not an absolute construct and is ephemeral, and situating myself in between myth and memory suits my narrative.
Q: You often leave things hidden or unspoken. Why is that important to you?
A: Negating, obscuring, and withholding are powerful hierarchical tools. It is only with the advent of the Me Too movement that I felt comfortable publicly sharing my history of trauma and the role it plays in my painting. The Me Too movement exposed violence against women and children out of the long-acknowledged shadows and gave a larger section of society a language to discuss trauma.
I have been questioned as to why I do not depict violence representationally and instead choose a more abstracted language. I have a strong aversion to being literal, and I am also not interested in superimposing meaning onto a viewer’s experience. I wish to explore elements that cannot be named but reside in the visceral. Hiding speaks to censure, shame, secrecy, but also power. These glimpses of underpainting or censoring speak to shadows and an acknowledgment of the subterranean that influences things in plain sight.
