Yvonne Jacquette has literally taken to the skies to capture the dense aerial landscapes depicted in the thirty-one paintings included in this survey of the last thirty-five years of her career. Jacquette, who divides her time between New York and Searsmont, Maine, charters planes or works from top-floor skyscraper offices, offering a pigeon’s view of urban centers and coastal areas. Her vibrant canvases, which use a gentle pointillist technique, variously show water towers perched on rooftops in the Lower East Side, high-rises in the Financial District, and a garret studio in Tin Pan Alley. Travels abroad have yielded frenetic, noirish views of at once exotic and familiar cityscapes, mostly differentiated by neon signs in foreign tongues. In Jacquette’s lurid, carnivalesque overviews, space is geometric and condensed; in some works, buildings fold in on one another. The urban paintings contrast with calmly removed ocean views of Maine, where the striated water is dotted with small tree-filled islands and white sailboats. Jacquette’s work offers little insight into how cities have changed in an age of rapid modernization. Rather, it highlights the consistent tones of the city and the sea as seen from the top down. —Julia Wolkoff
Pictured: Yvonne Jacquette: Herald Square Composite II, 1993, oil on linen, 76½ by 65¼ inches. Courtesy DC Moore, New York.