Artists: Xylor Jane - Alfred Jensen

Humankind’s attempt to find an underlying pattern to the universe has haunted us since before we saw the stars as constellations and asterisms. We live amid the collision of systems, from the digital to the ideological.
- John Yau, “Xylor Jane’s Cosmic Grids”, Hyperallergic, December 19, 2022

parrasch heijnen presents Xylor Jane / Alfred Jensen, an exhibition of new works by artist Xylor Jane (b.1963, Long Beach, CA) in conversation with select historic paintings by Alfred Jensen (b. Guatemala City, GT, 1903; d. Livingston, NJ, 1981).

Xylor Jane’s work encompasses both the optical and physical realms of experience, revealing systems of energy through expansive chromatic relationships. Evolving from the micro-intricacies that have become such a well-known vocabulary of Jane's work, the newest compositions provide room for the viewer to question and rationalize but also to absorb and be absorbed by the morphing networks of line, color, and shape.

For Jane, color holds space and time, at once solid and translucent. While specific colors are sometimes determined circumstantially, influenced by her surroundings or historical iconography, as in Mother Mary (2025), whose color references the Madonna and Child motif, the artist’s color sensibility comes from a Californian experience of light. Color is applied on gridded panels in translucent layers, its perception is influenced by its surroundings, delineating space, and relationships between overlapping and intersecting structures. Jane’s paintings hold time in a complete present, as in Bouquet Days, 2025, a vessel of knowledge to communicate ideas of one's lifetime. While color is light, color is also a vessel of dimensionality, creating volume through omnidirectional movement. Time seems to ungulate, to tuck within itself while also reaching past the scope of comprehension.

Alfred Jensen’s oeuvre is built on exploring relationships of knowledge through signifiers of numbers, colors, forms, and signs to reveal the invisible. As a lifelong autodidact and polymath, Jensen’s studies ranged from philosophy, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and ancient Peruvian, Mayan and Egyptian calendars and hieroglyphics. A world traveler from the time he was a child, Jensen learned to speak five languages. He befriended and collaborated with many influential artists and peers of his time. Understanding life’s harmonies through the balance of opposing forces, Jensen’s gridded compositions create a two-dimensional realm, structured through a delineation of dualities. The artist’s painted forms are mirrored and repeated, colors are set in compliments of warm and cold, positive and negative; a cyclical pendulum of unity within diversity.

Xylor Jane (b.1963, Long Beach, CA) lives and works in Greenfield, MA. Jane received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions including: parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles, CA; Canada, New York, NY; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; the University Museum of Contemporary Art, Amherst, MA; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, IT; Almine Rech, Paris, FR; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; and Four, Dublin, IE. Xylor Jane: Notebooks, the first publication to focus on Jane’s drawings and notes, sequenced by the artist herself and accompanied with essays by John Yau and Em Rooney, was published by parrasch heijnen and Canada in 2019. Xylor Jane is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles, CA, Canada, New York, NY, and Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin and Dusseldorf, DE.

Alfred Jensen was born in Guatemala City, GT, in 1903 and died in Livingston, NJ, in 1981. Jensen’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Buffalo, NY); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Dia Center for the Arts (New York, NY); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY); Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA). The estate of Alfred Jensen is represented by the Pace Gallery, New York, NY.