Ghost Clock

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Ghost Clock, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jeni Spota C., marking the artist’s first major solo exhibition with the gallery.

Celebrated for her distinctive approach to impasto oil painting and reinterpretations of religious iconographies, Spota C.’s latest body of work continues her established iconographic vocabulary, shifting her focus from reworking Giotto’s 14th-century fresco The Last Judgement, to the metaphysical. Using a language of signs and symbols—including clocks, celestial bodies, and the geometries of arcane rituals—the artist explores universal forms as a vehicle to deeper knowledge, examining the semiotic power to communicate the ineffable and expanding her lexicon within painting through densely-applied layers of viscous pigment.

With a vivid palette and material tactility, Spota C. explores the rhythms and tensions of time, constructing paintings as clocks which demarcate the literal and abstract through a series of mechanical movements. Directly following the passing of her beloved grandmother, Spota C. discovered a clock which had stopped at the exact time of her passing, a phenomenon and shared experience in Spota C.’s family and throughout human history. With an interest in the supernatural, the artist considers the mutable nature of time, questioning both the physicality and perception of temporal experience. Each painting contains a clock mechanism which allows the paintings to operate as functioning and abstracted time pieces, indicating the physical passage of hours, minutes, and seconds. Here, the clock becomes a metaphysical marker, its hands not only measuring time but revealing and concealing portions of the painting as they consistently move and cycle throughout the day, acting as an illusory placeholder between past and future, life and death.

On the gallery’s back wall, Spota C.’s monumental wall installation Supreme entangles bodily experience and time—a towering portal which attempts to channel her grandmother and blurs the line between the past, present, and eternal. The artist continues her long-standing fascination with the human experience and the way we navigate the unexplainable. This remains the core of her motivations into depicting unrealized realms of spiritual inquiry, faith, and magic.

Jeni Spota C. (b. 1982, New York) lives and works in Long Beach, CA. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Solo exhibitions include Jeni Spota C.: Encore!, Frederick R. Weisman Museum, Malibu, California (2024); Works on Paper, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, New York (2023); Brennan & Griffin, New York (2016, 2013, 2010); Don’t Tread On Me, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2009); and Giotto’s Dream, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2008), among others. She has been included in group exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara (2021); DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2017); Misako and Rosen, Tokyo (2017); Saatchi Gallery, London (2016); Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2012); Luxembourg & Dayan, New York (2011); Josh Lilley, London (2011); Parrish Art Museum, Southampton (2010); and Andrea Rosen Gallery (2009), among numerous others.