Jackie Saccoccio

American-born, Rome-based painter Jackie Saccoccio use abstraction as a form of portraiture, creating bright, large canvases with oil paint and sparkling mica powder. Her drippy, gestural images use layers of diaphanous color cascading in multiple directions. They often use a centrally placed form, taken as a stand-in for a sitter or subject. In works like her 2012 painting Portrait: Circus, an untraceable network of feathery marks produces the sudden visual experience of weight, density, and movement, as if from nothing. Many of Saccoccio’s portraits act more as depictions of feelings and experiences than of people or things.

Saccoccio has shown her work regularly since the mid-1990s, including exhibitions in Rome, Milan, Frankfurt, and across the United States. She is the recipient of the 2004-5 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a 2004 Claude Monet Foundation artist’s residency, and a Guggenheim Foundation grant.