Timothy Taylor has announced that it will begin working with the Paul and Suzanne Jenkins Foundation to promote and manage the legacy of American Abstract Expressionist painter Paul Jenkins, in collaboration with Ronchini Gallery. The gallery will show a painting by Jenkins in its booth at Art Basel Miami Beach this December.
The gallery will also organize a solo exhibition of Jenkins’s work from the 1950s–70s in its New York space in 2025. “I am particularly excited for new audiences to discover how his poetic and spiritual work fits within the history of mid-century American painting, and I very much look forward to developing exhibitions with the Foundation,” said gallery founder Timothy Taylor.
Born in 1923 in Kansas City, Jenkins served in the U.S. Naval Air Corps during World War II. Covered by the G.I. Bill, he attended the Art Students League in New York, where he worked under painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In 1953, Jenkins departed the United States to travel across Europe. He lived in Spain and Italy before settling in Paris.
During the late 1950s and ’60s, Jenkins shifted from oil to acrylic paint, developing a technique of pouring pigments directly onto flat, primed canvases on his studio floor. His work is often compared to fellow Abstract Expressionist legend Jackson Pollock, who Jenkins was friends with.
In 1954, Jenkins presented his first solo exhibition at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris. Two years later, he had his first show in New York at the tastemaking Martha Jackson Gallery. Around this time, he began to preface the titles of his work with the term “Phenomena,” at times calling himself an “abstract phenomenist.” Jenkins once described his artistic contribution as capturing “something that is there but cannot be seen except through the experience of painting.”
From the 1960s to the ’80s, Jenkins was the subject of several major retrospectives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. His work is featured in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
In 2012, Jenkins died in New York at 88 after a brief illness. In recent years, his solo shows have been staged by AM Arte Moderna, Ronchini Gallery, and Heather James Fine Art, among others.
