The painter mines an iconographical language of grief through delicate, translucent paintings imbued with a sense of intimacy and intensity.
Aruna D’Souza November 30, 2025 — 6 min read
Jennifer Packer, "Nate, Chey" (2025), oil on canvas (all photos Aruna D'Souza/Hyperallergic)
Even before her partner, the much-adored poet April Freely, passed away in 2021, Jennifer Packer was a painter of remembrance. Her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which opened months after Freely’s death, included “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!),” a tribute to Breonna Taylor, the young medical worker whose murder by police, along with that of George Floyd, sparked worldwide Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. It was Packer’s ability to evoke the emotional intensity of loss without depicting Taylor directly that struck me then — in the painting, she homes in instead on a young man lying on a couch in an acid yellow interior, surrounded by seemingly insignificant objects picked out of the miasma. “The logic is that of a mind seizing on inconsequential things in the process of coming to terms with an overwhelming grief,” I wrote at the time. Likewise, her tender portraits of friends veered between inchoate mark making and stunning specificity; even if their faces were blurred and scumbled, even if they melted into their monochrome surrounds, they were represented with an exactitude that allowed them to be fully and lovingly rendered.
In Dead Letter, her latest show at Sikkema Molloy Jenkins, Packer hones her painting to a delicate, razor-sharp edge, one that cuts deep into the questions of how people impress themselves onto the world and what traces they leave after they are gone. “What might generous observation, precision of language, representational urgency, and space for error produce? What is it to witness and be recognized in ways that transform quality and clarity of life?” she writes in her artist’s statement. This project is much different than one of processing the emotional fallout of a loved one’s death, or memorializing someone’s life. Rather, it feels like an investigation into how painting itself can be adequate to the complex process of seeing, feeling, and remembering.
Installation view of Jennifer Packer: Dead Letter at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. Left: "Pacemaker"; right: "Warp, Weft" (both 2025), oil on canvasIn the 21 works on view (all 2025), Packer approaches these questions with virtuous skill and a deep knowledge of the history of her medium. Take “A.D.I.P.T.A. after Jay Electronica”: at 8 by 12 feet, it is monumental, but Packer manages to imbue the scene with a sense of intimacy. Red is the overwhelming color, from the walls to the furniture to the two figures, one standing on the left, the other seated on the right, who seem to be caught in the “impossible communication” that Freely referred to in her 2014 poem “But Is It an Essay, Voyager Edition”: “This is an impossible communication, but that’s the only kind we want.” The standing figure holds her hand to her ear, as if speaking on a telephone, even though the wall-mounted phone next to her remains unused. The seated figure has a telephone receiver stuck to the side of her head, no hand holding it in place. And then there’s the title of the work, referring as it does to a tender song by the American rapper Jay Electronica, and suggesting that the frustrated desire to connect with others structures our relationships both in life and in death: “I got numbers in my phone that’ll never ring again/ ’Cause Allah done called them home, so until we sing again.”
The mood here is distinctly Matissean. The most obvious reference is “The Red Studio.” But there is more besides. At the center of the Packer’s composition are two voids: the impossible communication between the two figures and a dark blue form with a distinctively curved top that reads at once as a window and the surface of a grand piano. Both of these, for me, call to mind Matisse’s "Piano Lesson" (1916), which, despite its musical subject matter, has a strangely silent aspect. (Pianos show up in a number of pictures on view here, including "Warp, Weft" and "Anechoic Chamber.") The longer you look at a pale blue dining chair, the more apt it is to transform under your gaze into one of Matisse’s abstracted nudes, the slope of shoulders, buttocks, head, and pubis articulated with Packer’s delicate brush. The French Fauvist is not the only allusion, direct or less so, to art history here by any means, however. A picture within a picture of ballerinas seems to evoke Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, or maybe Noah Davis (another artist who, like Feely, died too young), while elsewhere we find a radically simplified, barely recognizable version of an Italian Renaissance image of the lamentation of Christ. Just as some Catholic saints are depicted holding churches in their hands to symbolize their role in supporting Christian communities, so does Packer’s seated figure balance a miniature suburban house on her fingertips. Pleasure, desire, home, care, loss, the frisson of knowing someone as much as — but no more than — they want to be known. Devastating.
Jennifer Packer, “A.D.I.P.T.A. after Jay Electronica” (2025), oil on canvasThe whole exhibition has the quality of a memento mori — a reminder of the fleeting nature of existence — not least because of the many flower paintings on view. Packer has characterized the motif as funerary bouquets, a means of both grounding herself in the studio and moving through specific losses in her life. Bodies at rest are infused with a sense of anxiety about their inevitable, eventual passing, especially in pictures like “Innocent of Vanity,” “The Pleasure of Being Ordinary,” “Melt,” and “Activity, The Pause,” which are not far removed from deathbed portraits. In paintings of people playing piano like “Warp, Weft” and “Anechoic Chamber,” standing figures place their hands on the musicians’ shoulders, a gesture of support that simultaneously recalls death’s gentle grip. Playing cards — long a symbol in art of the fragility of life, as when they are depicted arranged into a house of cards, or of chance and uncertainty, when they are shown as part of a game — flutter like translucent leaves between the hands of the young man who shuffles them in “Pacemaker.”
Even as Packer mines an iconographical language of grief, what of its painterly vocabulary? In the artist’s hands, it is the delicate, febrile lines that scarcely define tender parts of a loved one’s body, like the feet that she renders with such stuttering care, as if she needs time to recall them. It is the translucency of her washes of color that allows bodies to melt into each other, so the membrane between where one ends and the other begins is impossibly thin. It is her use of a single color that knits together interior spaces, cohering the different scales, degrees of description, and paint handling (for instance, broad, abstract strokes versus visible contours), and even materials, such as the collaged elements embedded in the largest work on view, “The Edges of Longing Is an Impossible Communication (Dead Letter).” But this cohesion is so tenuous, as with a dream's imposition of waking logic onto something that doesn’t make any sense.
When I went to see Dead Letter, it was the second show on a long list I intended to visit that day. I abandoned my plans and went straight home after. It felt too monumental, aesthetically and emotionally, to muddy by looking at anything else, especially at a time when loss — of people, of values, of faith, of hope — seems like all that I ever think about.
Jennifer Packer, “Activity, The Pause” (2025), oil on canvas
Jennifer Packer, "Untitled" (2025), oil on canvas
Jennifer Packer, “The Edges of Longing Is an Impossible Communication (Dead Letter)” (2025), oil on canvas with collaged elementsJennifer Packer: Dead Letter continues at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins (530 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, New York) through December 13. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
