The art of Jordan Casteel is based on empathy, creating a space where the boundaries between oneself and others are vanished through the bond of compassion and understanding in our humanity. with an affinity between souls that is reflected in their works of art.
Born in 1989 in Denver, Colorado, Casteel lives and works in New York. He studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy. He graduated from Agnes Scott University School in Georgia in 2011 and received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Yale University, having participated in several collective exhibitions during his university stay, including “13 Artists”, A historical show created by then-classmate Alol Erizku. In addition, despite her youth, she has long worked as a professor at Rutgers-Newark University.
From a masterfully skewed perspective and including soft, strong colors combined in vibrant amber, lavender and indigo, Casteel began painting portraits of friends, family and classmates, facing traditional preconceived notions of gender and race. Based on an almost anthropological quest and exploring sexuality, identity and subjectivity from its human component he tries to paint those who would not otherwise be represented on the walls of a museum. Reference must be made, in particular, to the realization of the personal and social reality of the African-American men and women living in Harlem, reflecting their daily life through a humanization that seeks to bring the viewer’s thinking into an intimate and close vision of what it means to be black in the United States today.
Her pictorial approach and bold use of color has been compared to artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Nancy Spero, Henri Matisse and Alicie Neel, who — Casteel herself recognizes it — served as inspiration and reference. The palettes Casteel develops in her work are based on an obsessive relationship with color and vitality based on her origin in her childhood and in the determination to overcome the previous limits of the interpretation of the reality that it offers us. She experiences the effects her colors have on the environments she paints and her relationship with her subjects, retreating the psychosocial characteristics of the mundane in harmony with the nuances and lines that unite to form a subtle crescendo that allows us to connect with the work in a beautiful, original and sometimes inscrutable way. Paintings flooded with amazing pigments that produce great chromatic enjoyment.
She debuted in 2014 with her first solo exhibition titled “Visible Man” in New York in which she showed the balance between the sensuality and sexuality of African-American men. He has subsequently exhibited in numerous galleries in which his works “Nights in Harlem”, “Returining the Gaze”, his first retrospective at the Denver Art Museum (his hometown), “Black Refractions” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she is a resident artist, or “Within Reach” his last exhibition, as early as 2020, which could be seen virtually at the New Museum in New York, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
Named in 2019, as one of the most influential artists”30 under 30″ by Forbes magazine, Jordan Casteel has managed not only to capture the looks, gestures and lives of the people around her in a thorough and detailed way but also to capture the attention of art lovers. A fabulous career path and a very promising future.
Soon, we will be able to enjoy his works at the New Time: Art and Feminism in the 21 century, UC Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (August 26-January 21, 2021)
