The Eye Is Not Satisfied with Seeing:

"The Eye Is Not Satisfied with Seeing" is the catalogue accompanying Jennifer Packer's touring institutional survey - at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, 2020-2021 - gathering the loosely worked, emotionally direct portraits and still lifes that established her as one of the decade's most closely watched figurative painters.

The 172-page book reproduces the exhibition's paintings and drawings alongside newly commissioned writing by Rizvana Bradley, Dona Nelson, Christina Sharpe, and fellow painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. It also includes an interview with Packer by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Packer's subjects - friends, family, and flowers made for people lost to police and state violence, including Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland - are painted with visible, unresolved brushwork. That brushwork resists the finish of conventional portraiture.

Packer (b. 1984, Philadelphia) earned a BFA at Tyler School of Art in 2007 and an MFA in painting from Yale in 2012, and works in a loose, layered style drawn from painters as different as Henri Matisse, Caravaggio, and Philip Guston, using color and unfinished passages to register how a subject is seen rather than to fix a likeness. "The Eye Is Not Satisfied with Seeing" marked the point at which that approach reached a wide museum audience. It followed earlier solo shows at the Renaissance Society, the Rose Art Museum, and Sikkema Jenkins.