Bill Jensen

Overview

SUBSTANCE, SPIRIT & SHADOW (T'AO CH'IEN 7TH C) (triptych) VERSION II, 2010-14

Change is good for art but hard on the artist. I feel that serious artists go into the studio day after day and let the art slowly take them, sometimes kicking and screaming, into new territories. They let the making of things have its own life, and this living force brings them into areas of creating they could never have imagined. Solutions come from this working process. Sometimes you have the feeling that you are being pulled by a team of wild dogs.

Bill Jensen is an American abstract painter whose works recognized for his unconventional compositions and profound sense of color.

Biography

Looking back over 20 or 30 years, I could never have dreamt where these images came from and where the art has taken me. To make something truly amazing is to make something you could never have dreamt of.

Bill Jensen was born in 1945 in Minneapolis, MN. He graduated in 1968 from the University of Minnesota with a BFA and two years later with an MFA. Jensen is renowned for his take on abstract expressionist styles of work, and for its use of shapes and imagery in large spaces on the canvas. Many consider the artist’s pieces to be eerie and dark. He had a showing in 1971 at the Brooklyn Museum, but Jensen was forced to take a short recess from painting after a toxic reaction to his paints later that year. Throughout the 1980s, Jensen was part of the Five Painters of New York. In 1987, the artist received the National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship. His abstract designs often contrasted light colors with dark, bold images.

Jensen’s work is part of public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, the Honolulu Museum of Art,Hawaii, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Works