Bill Jacobson grew up in Norwich, Connecticut and
received his B.F.A. from Brown University and his M.F.A. from the San Francisco
Art Institute. Jacobson began working in his signature blurry style in the
early 1980s while completing his graduate work in San Francisco, but he first
received major public attention with the exhibition of the Interim Photographs
at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University. These shadowy pale portraits
were intended to evoke the sense of loss and faded memory associated with
the AIDS epidemic. These pictures are also about the futility of capturing
human likeness in portraiture.
The Songs of Sentient Beings series, first shown in 1996, is still figurative but now the prints have deep black backgrounds and white ghostly figures and heads bend, sleep, stretch and howl all the while floating on a velvety ground, and the ground itself floats on a white background. The Thoughts series- an almost monochromatic deep black evocation of the flow of life- from tightly cropped faces to fields of grass and water- a deliberate linking of the figure to nature at large-suggest a flowing subtle narrative.
Jacobson shifted to color and working outside of the studio in the late 1990s which culminated in a second monograph published by Hatje Cantz in 2005. He has recently been working with a variety of themes, in color and in focus, yet never departing from his meditation on our passage through the world. Some Planes, a meditation on landscape and horizon was his most recent body of work show at the gallery in 2008. A third monograph called A Series of Human Decisions has been recently published by Decode Books with an Interview by Ian Berry.
The Songs of Sentient Beings series, first shown in 1996, is still figurative but now the prints have deep black backgrounds and white ghostly figures and heads bend, sleep, stretch and howl all the while floating on a velvety ground, and the ground itself floats on a white background. The Thoughts series- an almost monochromatic deep black evocation of the flow of life- from tightly cropped faces to fields of grass and water- a deliberate linking of the figure to nature at large-suggest a flowing subtle narrative.
Jacobson shifted to color and working outside of the studio in the late 1990s which culminated in a second monograph published by Hatje Cantz in 2005. He has recently been working with a variety of themes, in color and in focus, yet never departing from his meditation on our passage through the world. Some Planes, a meditation on landscape and horizon was his most recent body of work show at the gallery in 2008. A third monograph called A Series of Human Decisions has been recently published by Decode Books with an Interview by Ian Berry.
Some Planes 2007-2008 [view
images]
A Series of Human Decisions 2004-2008 [view
images]
New Year's Day 2002-2003 [view
images]
Untitled 1999-2001 [view
images]
Thought Series 1990-1998 [view
images]
Songs of Sentient Beings 1994-1995 [view
images]
Interim Series 1992-1993 [view
images]