Jesse Mockrin, Fracture, 2024. Oil on cotton, 91.4 x 142.2 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds from the F.P. Wood Fund, 2025 © Jesse Mockrin 2025. Image courtesy of the artist, James Cohan, New York and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Phoebe d'Heurle.
Inspired by Baroque paintings, sculptures, and drawings at the AGO, in her first solo museum exhibition, American artist Jesse Mockrin radically re-envisions familiar historical subjects—Bathsheba, Solomon, and Daphne among them—through her own contemporary, feminist lens. Urgent and subversive, Mockrin’s closely cropped compositions reveal the unsettling and uncanny dramas buried in the art historical canon. Curated by Adam Harris Levine, the AGO’s Associate Curator of European Art, this exhibition will feature more than 12 new large-scale paintings and works on paper, installed alongside paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the AGO’s European Collection.
Exhibition is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario.
The AGO wishes to recognize the support of James Cohan Gallery, New York.
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Jesse Mockrin (b. Silver Spring, MD, 1981) received her M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 2011, and her B.A. from Barnard College, New York in 2003. She has had solo exhibitions at James Cohan (New York), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Nathalie Karg Gallery (New York), Galerie Perrotin (Seoul), and the Centre for International Contemporary Art (Vancouver). Her work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art among others. Mockrin's work has been covered extensively, appearing in publications including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Vogue, Artforum, T Magazine, Art in America, and Modern Painters, among others.
Watch Jesse Mockrin create The Descent, 2024, the artist’s largest work to date, which will be featured at the AGO as part of her solo exhibition opening September 2025. Video is courtesy James Cohan Gallery.
