The Sum of All Parts

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to announce The Sum of All Parts an exhibition featuring Nell Blaine, Shirley Jaffe, Jess (Collins), Sarah McEneaney and Trevor Winkfield. This is the second annual summer exhibition to explore thematic links between artists in the gallery's program. The current exhibition consists of five large-scale works that explore fragmentation and cohesion: included are collage, paintings with collage and collage-like paintings. Each demonstrates strategies and building blocks in each artist’s approach to picture making.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Jess's large-scale paste-up, A Cryogenic Consideration; Or, Sounding One Horn Of The Dilemma [Winter], 1980, (pictured above) made from hundreds of collage elements with the Dutch Golden Age painting “Man in a Golden Helmet,” a work formerly attributed to Rembrandt, now his circle, superimposed on the Matterhorn, surrounded by intricate images from classical antiquity to modern life, demonstrating the density, complexity, and dispersion of popular culture and philosophical inquiry in Jess’s work. Winter is one of four works from Jess’s "Seasons" series. Contrasting to this work is Shirley Jaffe's The Chinese Mountain, 2004-05 (pictured below), where simplification and delineation coalesce in pure abstraction. Maybe this mountain exists as a Platonic ideal, or as a set of forms in perfect equipoise.

Trevor Winkfield's Mermaid’s Revenge, 1993, is divided into brightly colored, hard-edge sections that fuse Pop and Surrealism. The central image is a mermaid with a Greco/Roman head and a pineapple tail. Nell Blaine’s Street Encounter, 1950, is a cubist-inspired painting from a brief, important period in the 1950s when the artist’s work went from pure abstraction to figurative and representational work. Sarah McEneaney’s work, Summer Studio, 2021, is part collage, part painting. The work is a self-portrait of the artist in her studio surrounded by her own paintings and drawings. The paintings on the walls and tables are computer-generated reproductions collaged into the painting. Although many of the works may have long left the studio, they will always exist together as parts of a greater whole of the artist’s life and work.

Nell Blaine (1922-1996) arrived in New York City in 1942 to study with Hans Hofmann. Her first gallery exhibition was at the Jane Street Gallery in 1945, the first serious artist cooperative dedicated to Modern Art. It was there that she showed and won early acclaim for her hard-edged abstract paintings. She began showing at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953 and collaborated with Kenneth Koch in one of the gallery’s first poet/artist editioned projects. She became an influential member of the second-generation New York School. She has long been associated with a group of representational painters, including Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Leland Bell, Al Kresch, and Robert de Niro, Sr.

Nell Blaine has been the subject of over seventy-five museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States. Her work is in the public collections of many museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Modern Art. A monograph, Nell Blaine, her art and life, was published in 1998 with an essay by the artist’s friend, art critic Martica Sawin.

Shirley Jaffe (1923-2016) was born in New Jersey and grew up in Brooklyn and studied at Cooper Union. In 1949, as a young artist, she traveled to Paris where she then permanently settled until her death in 2016. She was part of a coterie of artists who were "Americans in Paris" after the war. This group included Sam Francis, Al Held, Janice Biala, Norman Bluhm, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell, and Kimber Smith. In the early 1960s Jaffe spent time in Berlin on a Ford Foundation Grant, and from the early 1960s onwards Jaffe exhibited extensively in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. In 1989 she had her first exhibition in New York at Artists Space and in the decades that followed her reputation in her home country has grown considerably. Tibor de Nagy Gallery has exhibited the work of Shirley Jaffe since 2002.

A Shirley Jaffe retrospective opened at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2022, curated by Frédéric Paul. This exhibition traveled to the Basel Art Museum and the Musée Matisse in 2023. Jaffe’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Musée de la Ville de Paris and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Basel Art Museum among many others.

Jess (1923-2004), born Burgess Collins in Long Beach, California, initially studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. He spent three years in the army at the Atomic Energy Laboratory, and had a small part in the Manhattan Project developing the first atom bomb. Following the war, while working again with atomic energy, he became disillusioned with science after having a nightmare about the world destroying itself, and instead turned to art. Jess studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts (the now closed San Francisco Art Institute). His teachers included some of the most influential West Coast painters of the period, including David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Clyfford Still. During this time, Jess met poet Robert Duncan, who would become his lifelong partner and frequent collaborator.

Jess was the focus of the exhibition Mythos, Psyche, Eros – Jess in California at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2019, curated by Nancy Lim and Solomon Adler. Other major exhibitions are the 1993 traveling retrospective A Grand Collage, organized by Michael Auping at what was then known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in 2014 the exhibition An Opening of the Field, was presented at the Grey Art Gallery, organized by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff, it showcased the circle of visual artists surrounding Jess and Duncan, and the 2007 exhibition focused on Jess's collaborations with poets and writers, To and From the Printed Page, curated by Ingrid Schaffner for ICI International. Jess is in the collection of most major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Detroit Institute of Art among many others.

Sarah McEneaney received a certificate of painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied at Philadelphia College of the Arts. She will have a major museum survey exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, in November 2025 and an upcoming gallery exhibition at Taymour Grahne Projects, Dubai, UAE, in January 2026. She had major solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX and the ICA Philadelphia. She has had regular solo gallery exhibitions in New York since 2001 and Philadelphia since 1979. McEneaney received a Purchase Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and has been awarded artist residencies at the Chinati Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans and the Ballinglen Art Center of County Mayo and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, in Ireland. Her works are in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, the Delaware Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Trevor Winkfield moved from his native England to New York City in 1969 and settled permanently. He sought out and befriended a group of like-minded artists and poets such as John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Rudy Burckhardt, and Edwin Denby, and on occasion collaborating with them on book covers and other projects. Since the 1970s Winkfield has had many solo exhibitions in New York and elsewhere. Winkfield has received numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2002, Winkfield was awarded the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French government. Winkfield, also a writer, has written extensively about art, in essays and reviews. He is the author of two books Georges Braque & Others: The Selected Art Writings of Trevor Winkfield, 1990-2009 and How I Became a Painter: Trevor Winkfield in Conversation with Miles Champion. Trevor will be included in the upcoming exhibition "Who's Afraid of Still Life?" at JJ Murphy Gallery this summer.