McKenzie Fine Art: Jessica Deane Rosner 2026 Exhibition

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467

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	Jessica Deane Rosner: A Miscellany of Drawings March 12 - April 19, 2026
	Small-scale and intimate, Rosner’s intricate and richly detailed drawings are predominately ink, but also include gouache, graphite, and colored pencil on paper, Yupo, and gesso board grounds. Highly labor-intensive, the densely patterned, linear, and geometric works have a devotional focus and are completed slowly, carefully, and intuitively over weeks and months. For the viewer, patient, long-looking is rewarded with the discovery of delightful moiré patterns created by accumulating, overlapping lines, by her use of bulging and pressing Matisse-like organic shapes, and by the tender and delicate lines that describe the geometric experience of simple structures in the built world. The thirty drawings in this exhibition were created over the past three years and include four bodies of work: near-monochromatic linear drawings; architecturally influenced grids and structures; drawings on Color-aid papers; and works from the artist’s ongoing Tally series. Rosner begins her drawings with lines or circles made using drafting tools such as a ruler, compass, and templates. The resulting shapes are subdivided, and the drawings are completed freehand, using intuition and experience as her guide. As she notes: “The hand-drawn lines and brush-painted shapes force me to confront my fallibility, showing wobbles, tremors, slips, smudges, and deviations which I know make the work stronger.” In her drawings on colored paper, she challenges herself by selecting unusual hues to keep from “falling into a decorative rut.” The Tally series arose from Rosner coming to terms with decades of contemplating extreme loss of living entities, whether human or environmental, “whatever creates a void on our planet,” and her desire to process and visually communicate the significance of that loss. She began with drawings using a recognizable tally mark; in the earliest works, the marks didn’t necessarily relate to a specific event but were instead a visual stand-in for a tremendous number. Over time, the series evolved into a record of historic events. For Rosner, “each time I drew a line with the understanding that the line represents a living being. It’s my way of honoring these lives, and taking the time necessary to draw these individuals, sometimes over many months when in fact these lives may have been extinguished in a few days, or hours, or in an instant.” For well over twenty years, Rosner has been exhibiting her work in galleries and museums, including the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA, the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, PA, and in Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art and the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smith College rare books collection and the R.I.S.D Museum of Art. Additionally, she has been award residencies at McDowell and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.