“The grid has always performed as a reliable structure with which to begin my paintings. In my recent work, the grid is opening and loosening. Portals appears. Familiar objects show up in imaginary settings. A bathtub lends a sense of scale. It is a stand in for a human presence and a site of renewal. Skies and oceans appear through geometric framing devices. Airplanes animate a vast landscape. In these dreamlike spaces there arises a theme of rescue, escape and freedom. The pairing of bathing bodies, body parts, household objects and dreamlike landscapes with geometric abstraction emphasizes the surreal nature of the images.”

- Jessica Gandolf

Born and raised in New York City, Jessica Gandolf has lived in Portland for 33 years. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MA from Brooklyn College where she studied with Lois Dodd and Lee Bontecou.

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“Gandolf’s paintings form a layered set of opportunities for engagement on the part of the viewer, highlighting the experience of perception when it is slowed by overlapping elements.  Her paintings are both abstract and figurative; spatial and flat; narrative and beautifully formal.  We pass through their sections as though through a series of silk curtains, each silently yielding to the next as we move deeper into her world.”
- Hilary Irons

Gandolf starts each painting by building an infrastructure meant to eventually house feelings and meaning. The constraints of the initial patterns eventually give way to themes of rescue, renewal and freedom.

Archway, 2026, oil on panel, 12 x 12 in

Gandolf is inspired by Philip Guston for the feelings of bravery she gets from his work, Katherine Bradford for the way she tells a story with an economy of gesture, and Giotto and Fra Angelico for the simplicity, the color, the serenity, and the depth of emotion in their paintings.

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