Timothy Yarger Fine Art and YARGER | STRAUSS Contemporary of Beverly Hills, California are proud to present the opening of Jean Wells: Good Humor on October 24, 2009 at 7 PM in Beverly Hills, CA.
The artwork of Jean Wells brings together the master craftsmanship of an Old-World, church mosaic tradition with the contemporary pop sensibilities of artists such as Jeff Koons, Claes Oldenburg, or Roy Lichtenstein. Made from brilliantly colored, custom, hand-cut glass, Jean Wells creates larger than life versions of everyday objects. Her giant hamburgers, ice cream sundaes, and forty-inch red lips are infused with humor and playfulness, as they simultaneously celebrate and poke fun at the American cultural propensity to be over the top.
Jean Wells was raised in a family of artists. Her father and uncle were both graduates of the Yale School of Art and her uncle Rudolph Franz Zallinger was the recipient of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Painting. As a child in the 1950s and 1960s, she apprenticed under her father, Thomas Winchester Wells, who was a lifelong master mosaicist and painter in the Catholic Church. Building on those traditional skills and with an emphasis on high-craftsmanship, she developed her own style of working three-dimensionally by creating sculptural forms and drawing inspiration from popular imagery of the times, such as soda shops, diners, gumball machines, and ice cream cones.
In 2007, Jean Wells enjoyed a solo exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art in San Diego, California, followed by group shows in 2008 at Bridge Art Fair Berlin in Berlin Germany, San Diego Aerospace Museum in San Diego, California, ASAE San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California, La Jolla Athenaeum in La Jolla, California, the L.A. Art Show, Los Angeles, California and the John Madden Museum in Denver, Colorado. In May 2009, Jean Wells opened her exhibition Mosaico at Imaginart* in Barecelona, Spain and was a featured artist at SCOPE Basel, Switzerland in June 2009.