JILL DOWNEN

Emplacement

March 6 - April 11, 2026

Bruno David Gallery is pleased to announce Emplacement, an exhibition of 3 new large drawings by Kansas City-based Artist Jill Downen. This is Downen’s seventh solo exhibition at Bruno David Gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work featuring an in-depth exhibition history and bibliography.

About the Emplacement exhibition, Jill Downen states: "Drawing is the first form of expressivity, before verbal acquisition, to reach out and touch a surface in a way that leaves a mark. Drawing is the main artery that runs through my life’s work: the immediacy of thought, to make sensations and ideas visible. Drawing with plaster fits my sensibilities and physicality. After years of drawing with plaster on various grounds, including paper, I arrived at the conclusion that the plaster needed an architectural substrate. Wood lath brings the skeletal support and conceptual framework in a unified form. These materials allow me to erase with chisels and grinders, building up the surface and then taking it back down to the bones cyclically until the piece is resolved."

Jill Downen is an artist who works in sculpture, installation, and drawing. A critical event in their formative years, a lightning strike to the family home, imprinted a heightened awareness of the body, architecture, and temporality that would, in time, inform the core of their artistic practice. Their most recent work, a body of drawings made with plaster on plaster grounds, evolved from previous installations to embrace the potential of an empty wall as a site for contemplation. "My artwork makes a place for silence, subtlety, and sensitivity to perceptions. When one wonders, “Where am I?” symbolically or philosophically, my work offers a respite before returning to the speed of life with measured focus.

Jill Downen is the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award, the Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artists Award, and a Santo Foundation Grant. Jill Downen has created installations at The Momentary/Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, The Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and for Open Spaces: The Exhibition. Their residencies include the MacDowell Colony National Endowment for the Arts residency, and Cité International des Arts residency in Paris, MASS MoCA, and Art Omi, among others. Their art has been reviewed in publications including Whitehot, INES Magazine, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times and Bad at Sports. They hold a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis. Jill Downen is the chair of sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute.