Jordan Casteel

New York

Jordan Casteel’s colourful, large-scale oil paintings articulate the beauty in the ordinary. Depicting moments of quiet intimacy, her still-life compositions feature subtle references to Black history and contemporary culture while her portraits capture people from the communities in which she lives and works. These include former classmates at Yale, where she earned her MFA, street vendors near her home in Harlem and her own students at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey. It should come as no surprise that Casteel has cited Alice Neel as her favourite painter – her works owe much of their innate sympathy for their subjects to the earlier artist – but the elaborate confidence of Casteel’s brushwork declares a style all her own. In 2019, the High Line commissioned a large-scale mural of Casteel’s The Baayfalls (2017), a painting depicting two Harlem street vendors. She has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York (2020), the Denver Art Museum (2019) and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (2019).

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