JACOB FEIGE

The Leaf People series extends my interest in Byzantine icons and their modern parallels, especially in the universalized figures of Kazimir Malevich, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Oskar Schlemmer. These artists explored the collective, often faceless figure in response to industrialized society, a concept that feels equally relevant in today’s digital culture, where algorithms amplify exaggerated, hyper-expressive portraits yet drive increasingly mechanical behavior. My paintings adopt the icon's portrait structure, creating an anonymized, digital-era “self.”

In these works, subjects start as abstract geometric drawings, familiar yet impersonal—a simulacrum of portraiture, where cues to emotion, identity, and age are deliberately muted. Most paintings pair figures, suggesting relationships without overt connection. The figures hover between figuration and abstraction.

Portraits are cast in carved plaster with intermittent cutouts, giving an incomplete, transparent quality. In the Lovers series, they overlay canvases painted with tracings of leaves collected around my home, each distinct. Synthetic colors distance the figures from natural skin tones and foliage. This series invites reflection on the individual self: are we distinct beings with agency, or more like leaves—variations swept by societal forces and algorithms? These questions remain intentionally open.

JACOB FEIGE received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005. His work was on view at Rule Gallery, Marfa, TX and Denver, CO; David Richard Gallery, New York, NY; Lombard Freid Projects, New York, NY; Movement, Worcester, UK; Wasserman Projects, Detroit, MI; Chambers Fine Art, Beijing, China; Watergate Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; among other venues. In 2024, he was an artist-in-residence at Alfred University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany, and in 2018 at the Princeton Cyprus Expedition, Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus. He was awarded a New Jersey Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 2022. His work was featured in Artforum, Frieze, The New Yorker, Art in America, and Title Magazine, among others.