Friends, Family and Other Misfits: Devorah Jacoby at Donna Seager Gallery

Artist Devorah Jacoby invites viewers into her insightful world in an exhibition of paintings entitled “Friends, Family and Other Misfits”. The exhibition at Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael runs from March 1 to April 14. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, March 6 from 6 to 8pm. Catalogs are available through the gallery.

From the catalog essay by Paul Liberatore

In the dreamy, sometimes nightmarish world painter Devorah Jacoby creates on canvas, dichotomies coexist with a quiet psychological power – chaos and calm, violence and tranquility, rebellion and conformity, domesticity and adventure, beauty and ugliness.

Devorah Jacoby’s paintings are psychologically savvy. They expose the multiple layers of human interaction and explore the duality between the need to belong and the desire to be separate. They grapple with real and complex impulses and dynamics found in all relationships. The paintings are both fierce and beautiful, in one presenting a woman stepping over dogs fornicating on the stairs, in another a woman emerging from a roof, with a child on her back, contemplating flight.

There’s humor to Jacoby’s work, strange and dark, while the colors and brushstrokes suggest that her characters are both enchanted and frightened by the world they inhabit.

Inspired by such artists as Marlene Dumas and the Verist portrait painters Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Christian Schad and Egon Schiele, Jacoby’s expression is a painterly one. She moves masterfully between detailed imagery and abstraction, delighting in the process.

Devorah Jacoby, Friends Family and Other Misfits Catalog with essay by Paul Liberatore
$20