Jesse Mockrin – First Romance

James Cohan is pleased to present “First Romance”, a new series of drawings by Jesse Mockrin, her second solo exhibition with James Cohan and is presented concurrently with “Jesse Mockrin: Echo”, the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, on view through March 2026.

Jesse Mockrin is known for making paintings and drawings that extract details from art historical references, often European Old Masters, recontextualizing cultural narratives through a contemporary feminist lens. Recent work has drawn our attention to centuries of Biblical and mythic women whose canonical stories were written for and by men, and whose likenesses were painted largely by male artists for male patrons. In her latest series of graphite drawings, Mockrin turns her attention to boys in uniform.

“First Romance” juxtaposes the struggles of male youth in today’s America, masculinity on film, the underage soldiers of the Civil War, present-day Civil War reenactors, and Italian Renaissance paintings of young noblemen and soldiers. Mockrin traces a developing history of performative dress for battle, from ornate medieval armor to Western flannel shirts. These uniforms are signifiers of masculinity, advertising the nationality, allegiance, rank, and character of the boys they adorn even as they flatten individuality. She plays up the contrast between the awkward physicality of her subjects and the ornate weaponry they wield, as if they are naively playing dress up.

This series is rooted in Mockrin’s ongoing study of aestheticized masculinity – past bodies of work have taken Korean pop idols, androgynous Gucci models and the rakish boys of John Singer Sargent as her disparate sources. She upends and makes strange Western art historical precedents for hypermasculine and hyperfeminine beauty ideals, obscuring gendered features to emphasize androgyny. For the artist, this gender fluidity allows for multiplicities of interpretation, desire, and desirability and points to the changing codes of gender across time and culture.

Mockrin’s drawings showcase her exquisite draftsmanship and her dedication to adhering to historical modes of working. Her choice of paper is reminiscent of what is commonly referred to as Venetian blue paper, used widely in Western Europe from the 14th to the 18th century and prized for allowing for strong contrasts between light and dark. Mockrin uses black and white graphite pencil to create these evocative and intricately detailed images. She then employs anachronistic, photographic modes of cropping and framing to enliven and destabilize historical material.

Mockrin began this series by reading “Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era” by Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances M. Clarke, which explores the prevalence of underage soldiers who fought in the Civil War. “As the mother of two pre-teen boys,” Mockrin says, “I was especially moved by the nineteenth century photographs of the underage soldiers – their overconfidence and vulnerability, their excitement and trepidation, and the horrors they must inevitably have faced.”

Jesse Mockrin (b. 1981, Silver Spring, MD) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 10 am – 6 pm

Exhibition Duration 10 October – 01 November 2025

www.jamescohan.com

Location:
James Cohan Gallery
52 Walker Street
10013 New York, NY
United States