Spanning video, photography and performance, Jen DeNike’s work negotiates a distinctly feminine perspective on gender roles. A director of choreographed movements, her structuralist approach to time is grounded in the formal language of photography. Evoking cinematic archetypes, aesthetic cannons build a gravity of repetitive actions, forming a psychogeography of both real and imagined utopias with a reverence for nature and architecture that interchangeably function as containers of desire and places of intervention.
DeNike received her MFA from Bard College. Her work has been exhibited internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf; MoMA PS1; The Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Participant Inc; 54th Venice Biennale; Garage Projects, Moscow; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; MOCA Toronto; MACRO ROMA; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart; Red Line Contemporary Art Center, Denver; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-On-Hudson; MEF Museo Ettore Fico, Torino; Schauspiel Köln Opera House; Art Basel Miami Film Sector; and Wallis Annenberg Center For the Performing Arts, Los Angeles. Select commissioned projects include Bombay Beach Biennale, EMPAC, LAND Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Creative Time, Performa Biennial and Faena Art. Her work is held in the permanent public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Julia Stoschek Collection, among other private collections. DeNike lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2019, DeNike premiered the first act of her new ballet Crystal Cut Levitation for her first solo exhibition at signs and symbols. A publication dedicated to the artist’s two ballets Scrying (2010) and Crystal Cut Levitation (2019-21) is currently in progress.
DeNike’s forthcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition Sculpting Time with an accompanying book at Feld+Haus in Germany and group exhibition at Museo de la Ciudad in Mexico.
EXHIBITIONS
Being Like Water, January 13 – March 10, 2018
If She Hollers, November 14 – December 19, 2015
The Star Card, November 10, 2012 – January 26, 2013
The Scrying Trilogy, September 17 – October 23, 2010
