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Jemima Kirke’s Paintings of Girls

2015-01-30

The Rhode Island School of Design alumna, who calls herself an artist first, actress second, is cautiously aware of the “specialness” of her situation, but reasons, “if someone was willing to show my work now, I don’t really care why. I’m honored to have the platform.” For the past few years, when Kirke hasn’t been shooting, she’s been painting in the basement-cum-studio of her Carroll Gardens brownstone, which she shares with husband Michael Mosberg and their two toddlers, Memphis Jack and Rafaella. She moves quickly, in real-time, and describes the process as ultimately finding some other perspective than what she sees in front of her. “It’s like a crapshoot,” she says.

While Kirke credits Edouard Manet and Lucian Freud as major influences, it was her “typical, Jewish sort” of mother (Lorraine Kirke, the owner of the West Village vintage boutique Geminola) who nurtured young Jemima’s artistic spark at a young age. “The moment she saw that I was able to render flowers, or colored in well, she wanted that for me,” she recalls, describing how Lorraine turned the wine cellar of their home in England into a white-walled art studio for her 8-year-old daughter to use.

“Platforms” will feature seven canvasses of all-female subjects, a common theme with the 30-odd pieces the artist has already sold in her career. (Kirke chalks up her gender preference to an intimacy thing: “I’m going to be more inclined to tell a woman, ‘Would you mind taking your clothes off?’ I’m pretty standard that way.”) Not surprisingly, there’s a focus on nubility and girls of a certain age: past sitters have included friends like Dunham, Liv Tyler and Annabelle Dexter-Jones. For this catalogue, she’s showing nudes of her actress sister Lola Kirke and her Pilates and fitness trainer, Cadence Dubus, but also more innocent clothed portraits of little girls, like her 3-year-old daughter. Here, she offers an exclusive peek at some of her works that will be on view.