Inspired by found patterns of steel remainders from the auto-engine industry, Jennifer Riley takes these shapes and uses them to define and delineate areas for color to express notions of transition from whole to part through subtraction and change.  

Riley makes abstract paintings in which the primacy of drawing, color, line, nature, and the built environment thread throughout. The artist has a keen awareness of the pressure towards an integration of technology, anthropology, industry and the natural world.

Jennifer Riley was born and raised in Sharon, Connecticut in 1965. Riley’s work has earned critical attention for her solo exhibitions in NYC,  Boston, DC,  Las Vegas and across the US. Riley has been the subject of over twenty solo exhibitions since 1992, most recently exhibiting  a sprawling solo exhibition Schmetterling Haus at 1GAP Gallery in Brooklyn, and   “Machine Series” paintings at Silas von Morisse Gallery, New York. Riley’s paintings and large-scale installations and commissions are held in many public, corporate and private collections.  In 2017 she received a 6 year studio space subsidy grant from Two Trees Cultural Foundation in Dumbo, NYC.  In 2004 Riley received the Award in Painting from the Massachusetts State Cultural Council.

She received her BFA in a joint program from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; a diploma in translation from Rouen University (France); and her MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Her critical writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, The New York Sun   ArtCritical.com, and in numerous  exhibition catalogues for other artists and institutions. She has an extensive career as an educator which includes positions at Harvard Graduate School of Design for the Rome Program, which she directed, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Montserrat College of Art, and  Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She is now a founding Associate Professor in the Master of Architecture Program at Indiana University.  

She divides her time between Columbus and Brooklyn, maintaining studios in both cities.