J E R E D  S P R E C H E R   | | |   biography

[lives & works – Knoxville, TN]

JERED SPRECHER received his MFA from The University of Iowa. He has had solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Gallery 16, San Francisco; Stephen Zevitas Gallery, Boston; Kinkead Contemporary, Los Angeles; and the Knoxville Museum of Art. His work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Des Moines Art Center, Hunter Museum, and Espai d'art Contemporani de Castelló. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bailey Opportunity Grant, and a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. He has also received artist-in-residence awards from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, the Chinati Foundation, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He is a Professor in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee. He lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.

As an artist I make paintings that exist in the sliver of space between abstraction and representation. My work compresses time into the surface of painting, that old technology. Increasingly flora, fauna, and natural phenomena hold my attention, as I wrestle with this imagery that we daily experience through our technology.  Birds, plants, flowers, stones, and fires dissolve into the light of the screen, the digital lens, and the glowing tablet. There is something elegant and tragic about the light of the screen pressing the image of a delicate flower into one’s memory. Light, flower, and technology are here and also fade away.