Karma gallery now represents the estate of Yvonne Jacquette (1934-2023). The artist was prolific throughout her six-decade career, creating a breadth of work in painting, drawing and prints. A subjective take on perspective anchors Jacquette’s oeuvre, which reflects an introspective approach to looking. The Pittsburgh-born artist is likely best known for painting aerial nighttime views of brightly lit cityscapes and domestic interiors glimpsed at unexpected angles.
“The whole arc of my mom’s work has been about point of view,” the painter Tom Burckhardt, Jacquette’s son, tells The Art Newspaper. Brendan Dugan, the founder of Karma, sees a “very American” quality in the artist’s approach to observation, praising the inventiveness of her perspectives, “whether looking up at the rafters at her loft or exploring the shadow’s play with the floor”. Dugan also highlights the “cinematic” quality of Jacquette’s paintings, which occasionally include a plane’s wing in the foreground or are bordered by a window frame.
In addition to the decades she spent in New York City, Jacquette had a second home in Maine, which provided inspiration for her work and friendships with peers in the northeast such as Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, Mimi Gross and Neil Welliver. Jacquette’s paintings of natural vistas glimpsed through windows and domestic scenes focused on architectural details—such as Under-Space (1966), a close-up of her two-years old son’s high-top chair—coincided with motherhood.
Yvonne Jacquette, Walmart and Other “Big Box” Stores, Augusta, ME II, 2006 © The Estate of Yvonne Jacquette. Courtesy the estate and Karma
In ensuing decades, she devoted many canvases to glimmering nocturnal views of New York City and vertiginous vistas of cities such as Honolulu and Tokyo seen from the sky. A dedicated window-seat passenger, Jacquette made pastel sketches on paper during take-off and landing that she would eventually turn into larger paintings. This interest in aerial perspectives was fueled in part by her parents’ move to California, which provided an impetus for frequent cross-country flights. These were followed by trips across the globe and chartering her own planes and helicopters in reach singular vantage points. Burckhardt says: “She wasn’t interested in navigating the world through the common horizontal landscape.”
Karma, which has locations in New York and Los Angeles (and a seasonal outpost in Maine), currently has Jacquette’s work in the Manhattan group show The View From Inside (until 20 December). On its stand at Art Basel Miami Beach, the gallery is showing Walmart and Other “Big Box” Stores, Augusta, ME II (2006), an aerial view of the titular suburban Maine town.
“When an artist is no longer around and the work is now fixed, it immediately gets historicised, so our mind was instantly at setting up an estate,” Burckhardt says of the decision to change his mother’s representation after almost three decades showing with DC Moore Gallery. “We need a gallery that can track works sold over the decades and maintain a detailed inventory.”
Karma is planning a solo show of Jacquette’s work at its Chelsea location later in 2026.
