From the Air — Yvonne Jacquette

Yvonne Jacquette (b. 1934, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; d. 2023, New York City) made paintings, drawings, and prints that transcended conventional perspectives, capturing unusual views of environments both urban and pastoral. Beginning in the 1960s, Jacquette depicted the architecture of her immediate surroundings from oblique vantage points. Her early paintings reflect her life in New York City and summers in Maine, where she played a central role in an artistic community that included Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Fairfield Porter. In 1969, a flight from New York to San Diego inspired her to represent the world as seen from high above, and by 1975 aerial perspectives had become the primary subject of her work. Over the next five decades, Jacquette created an oeuvre of nearly Pointillist impressions of rural landscapes, suburban sprawl, and the glowing lights of cities like New York, Chicago, and Tokyo, among others. Working from drawings and photographs made during trips in hired aircrafts or from atop skyscrapers, she translates her fleeting visions into paintings that consider the complex systems structuring modern life. Driven by formal inquiry rather than mimetic accuracy, many of her paintings—particularly her nocturnes—approach abstraction. In 1990, she began integrating multiple points of view into composite images, complicating her works’ relationship with reality. Until her death in 2023, Jacquette sought, in her own words, to “keep discovering things, whole pictures that haven’t been painted before.”