Jenny Scobel

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Jenny Scobel is an American painter. Born in Orrville (Ohio, US) in 1955, she now lives and works in New York (US).

Scobel’s oeuvre mainly consists of portraits executed on prepared wooden panels in graphite and oil paint. She chooses the heads, whether they belong to well-known personalities or anonymous people, and cuts them out of print media or photographs. She then places the heads onto random torsos. This causes a deformation in the figures, for the head and body do not originally belong to the same body and the proportions are inaccurate. As leitmotiv throughout her oeuvre Scobel paints the same model over and over again, always on a different torso, always in a different décor. The scenery often appears to be wallpaper with decorative patterns, dating back to the 1930s and 40s and causes, in combination with the frontal figures, a sense of estrangement. The paintings incorporate at the same time beauty and decay.

Jenny Scobel had several solo-exhibitions in Europe and the USA, including "Unsolved Mysteries" in Molloy College Rockville Centre, New York in 1999. In 2004, Scobel participated in the exhibition "Sagt holde Frauen: 15 zeitgenssische Kunstlerinnen und das Medium Zeichnung" at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel (DE). A small catalogue was published in 2006 for her solo exhibition at Galerie der Stadt Backnang (DE).