The last time we spoke to Jenny Morgan felt like a different world, a distant era. In reality, it was on a rooftop in Miami during Basel week in 2019 as we celebrated our 25th anniversary with a works on paper show that Morgan was in, and it was an incredible passionate, insightful conversation with the past cover artist. Even then, she was looking deep into humanity, herself, the questions of selfhood and friendship and painting emotions that were both audible and visual. She said then, “I’ve been craving invisibility, in a sense,” and that always stood out to me as the world took a new shape in the months to follow.
Morgan is back from that desired invisibility with a bold new body of work, No Endings for the Wild, on view at Anat Ebgi starting this week. It’s a spiritual journey through Morgan’s best skills of creating something both realistic but ethereal. Of the title, a play on “no rest for the wicked,” Morgan likens her coined phrase as it relates to the “dualities of wild, animal, and embodied experience of being alive in relation to the spiritual, ephemeral aspects of our nature.” It feels like a deep overview of the human psyche in this era of shared hazy longing, works that feel calm but have a sharp edge of danger to them. What I have always loved about Morgan is that you aren’t just looking at portraits but somethign more internal, an elevation of the spirit, and its a welcome sight to see her visible again. —Evan Pricco
