Jenny Ahmad

Jenny Ahmad is an emerging artist living in Canberra, where she often paints the nearby bushland and surrounding reserves and wilderness areas, exploring landscape in an intuitive way and abstracting plein air research and observation in the studio.

Jenny’s paintings teeter between abstraction and figuration, interested in how representation and memory is messed up by attachment and experience and investigate the way space and objects are skewed by emotion. Her use of paint swings between very visceral and physical mark-marking and hesitant drawing, with half-seen objects and mistakes, resulting in landscapes that are very atmospheric and evocative.

 In Jenny’s landscapes, obscured images of familiar trees and rock-forms become unknown and exotic, and her erased and re-inscribed lines seem to wobble into sight, like a kaleidoscope vision giving glimpses of the real. Jenny’s primal and energetic paintings, laced with delicate drawing and corrections, try to capture the experience of being in a place and create a poetic response and treatment of landscape that evokes the gaps and distortions of memory and physicality. 

Jenny Ahmad has participated in many group shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra with curators like Amber Cresswell Bell and AK Bellinger and Grainger Gallery in Canberra and also has been a finalist in many national Art Prizes like the 2020 John Glover Art Prize and the 2021 John Villiers Outback Art Prize, as well as winning The Peg Minty Prize for Landscape.