Bill Jensen valuation
Small, dense, slowly built abstractions that owe more to Ryder and Blake than to New York.
Bill Jensen was born in Minneapolis in 1945 and has worked in Brooklyn since 1970.
What a work by Bill Jensen is worth
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Bio
Bill Jensen was born in Minneapolis in 1945 and has worked in Brooklyn since 1970. He came to attention in the late 1970s with small, densely worked abstract paintings made over long periods, at a moment when scale and speed were the prevailing values — the reference points were Albert Pinkham Ryder, William Blake, Marsden Hartley and Chinese painting rather than the immediate New York past. Later work grew larger and looser and drew increasingly on Daoist thought and on translations of classical Chinese poetry, but the method has stayed the same: many layers, long revision, and a surface that carries its own history.
A committed rather than a broad market, principally American, with strong critical standing and steady institutional interest. The small early panels are scarce and sought; the larger later canvases form the bulk of what is available. Because the paintings are built from many layers over years, drying cracks and an uneven, matt surface are original characteristics and are regularly misreported as damage in condition reports. Jensen has also made a substantial body of works on paper and etchings, which are the accessible part of the output.
Minnesota, Williamsburg and the museums
Jensen took his BFA in 1968 and his MFA in 1970 at the University of Minnesota, and was among the first artists to set up a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was in a group show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1971 and had his first solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1973. In 1986 the Museum of Modern Art gave him a solo exhibition.
He showed with Mary Boone between 1993 and 2002 and is represented by Cheim & Read in New York. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn and the Albertina in Vienna, among others.
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