JESSE MOCKRIN
(b. 1981, Silver Spring, MD)

Unyielding

2023

Oil on canvas
13 ¼ x 9 inches (33.7 x 22.9 cm)

“Venus, Susannah, Bathsheba, Mary Magdalene—as well as witch, seductress, and sinner—are examples of the contradictory cultural narratives about women that are woven into Western European art history. The female body is the favored metaphor for lust, the life cycle and even painting itself. To me, these examples all pile on top of each other until the female body, like Atlas holding up the world, is left struggling under the weight of all that has been ascribed to it.”          -Jesse Mockrin

Jesse Mockrin’s luminous oil paintings extract details from Old Master paintings, reformulating and recontextualizing cultural narratives and art historical motifs to speak to the present. She employs strategies of fragmentation, enlargement, and amalgamation to recompose subjects from the art historical canon, imbuing these images with new layers of significance. Her deliberate embrace of ambiguity further complicates the reading of this recognizable source material. Through a contemporary feminist lens, the artist gives her subjects new agency, often antithetical to their original narratives and the ways in which they have historically been depicted by male artists.

Unyielding takes as its starting point a depiction of the penitent Mary Magdalene by Guido Reni, the great master of the Bolognese Baroque (Fig. 1). Mockrin has focused on the Magdalene’s delicately folded hands—an expression of the figure’s repentance—and has refashioned them into the hands of Saint Agatha. Agatha was a 3rd-century martyr who was imprisoned, tortured, and had her breasts torn off with tongs for spurning the advances of the Roman prefect Quintianus—keeping her vow of virginity and remaining steadfast in her faith. Saint Peter miraculously appeared to Agatha in prison and healed her wounds, but she died soon thereafter.

The artist has written of the painting:

“I created Unyielding (2023) to contrast with Guido Reni’s Magdalene, juxtaposing the recurrent historical gesture of hands crossed over the chest—in one case, with the “penitent” Magdalene modestly covering her breasts with her hair, and in the other, the besieged Saint Agatha holding a blood-soaked cloth against her mutilated chest. The missing breasts—whether covered or torn off—represent the long-standing religious and secular desire to control women’s bodies. 

These two female religious figures suffered (one at the hands of male attackers, the other at the hands of a patriarchal culture), but both Agatha and Magdalene deserve a rewrite—Agatha for holding to her values despite coercion and torture and Mary Magdalene for being the closest female follower of Jesus, and not a reformed prostitute as she was so often depicted.”

In Mockrin’s painting Agatha’s hands both conceal and direct the viewer to her blood-stained drapery. As with Baroque treatments, such as Francesco Guarino’s Saint Agatha (Fig. 2), the brutality of the saint’s martyrdom is depicted obliquely in showing not the actual wounds, but rather their aftermath—a strategy that intensifies the viewer’s emotional response to the horror of the assault.  

Mockrin’s exacting technique produces a fictive surface of uncanny purity. Agatha’s face is absent, as is the rest of her body. What is seen is flesh of incomparable beauty, hands with tapering fingers, and an impossible thumb that is at once arresting and discomfiting. These markers of beauty and elegance overlay, both visually and thematically, the evidence of her grisly martyrdom.

 The artist’s interest in Mary Magdalene is related to the popular characterization of her as a penitent sinner and former prostitute, stemming from Pope Gregory I’s 591 AD conflation of Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany. Mockrin has reflected: “This trait of Mary Magdalene as a ‘sinful woman’ is something she acquired through millennia of misinformation, spread mostly by men. It raises an interesting parallel with how women’s credibility is attacked in the same ways now, and how misinformation spreads and causes damage.” Saint Agatha, by comparison, serves as a more current and urgent symbol within Mockrin’s art. The present work relates to the artist’s passionate response to the landmark Dobbs decision—which stripped away the constitutional right to abortion in the US—and its consequences for women. For Mockrin, the story of Saint Agatha illustrates how entrenched the desire is to police women’s bodies and sexuality. While her story is gruesome, it is important and not entirely negative. Agatha was tortured for remaining celibate and refusing to marry, and her fate and the artist’s treatment of it serves as a call for women’s autonomy.

About the artist:

Jesse Mockrin has been the subject of solo exhibitions at James Cohan, New York; the Center of International Contemporary Art of Vancouver, Canada; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York; and Galerie Perrotin, Seoul. Her work was most recently featured in the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, and she has been included in group exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Bunker, West Palm Beach; Perrotin, Paris; Mrs., Queens; James Cohan, New York; Friends Indeed, San Francisco; SPURS Gallery, Beijing; and Almine Rech, Brussels, among others.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Rubell Collection, Miami; the Aurora Museum, Shanghai, China; Hans-Joachim and Gisa Sander Foundation, Darmstadt, Germany; KRC Collection, Voorschoten, the Netherlands; and the Xiao Museum, Rizhao, China, among others. Mockrin lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.