Jenna Gribbon

Jenna Gribbon was born in 1978 in Knoxville, Tennessee. She earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia's Lamar Dodd School of Art in 2001, then spent years working, including as a painter and color technician for Jeff Koons and on a commission from Sofia Coppola to contribute paintings to the film Marie Antoinette, before returning to school for an MFA at Hunter College, City University of New York, completed in 2019.

Her paintings are figurative and often domestic in scale and subject: oil portraits of her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott (known professionally as Torres), her family, and her circle of fellow painters, rendered with a directness that repeatedly returns to the experience of looking and being looked at. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and continues to exhibit actively as of 2026, including a first major solo museum survey, Entwined, at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

Gribbon's rise has been closely tracked by mainstream art criticism. Critic Jerry Saltz was among the writers who took early notice of her figurative painting in 2019, helping draw attention to her work beyond the gallery circuit. In 2022, her inclusion in Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at The Frick Collection placed her work in direct conversation with the museum's historical holdings, an exhibition shaped in part by curator Aimee Ng around Gribbon's own vantage point on the people she loves. The recurring critical thread is her handling of intimacy and the gaze, painting the people she loves without softening the fact that she is the one doing the looking.

Gribbon's auction history is still being established, and public reporting is inconsistent about her top result. The best-documented sale with both a confirmed price and auction house is Gushing crevicescape, which sold for USD 101,600 at Phillips, though the exact sale date is not independently confirmed. A higher figure of USD 478,800, for a work reported as Sentiment / Sediment, has also circulated but without a confirmed auction house or date. Her most recently documented sale, Box Opener (2023), realized USD 25,400 at Christie's in New York on 27 February 2026, down from USD 76,200 when the same painting sold at Sotheby's in 2023. Consistent auction activity for her work dates only to the early 2020s, so any single result should be read against a small and still-forming sample.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Gribbon, and none is expected soon given how early her career remains; verification runs through her representing galleries, Lévy Gorvy Dayan and MASSIMODECARLO, rather than through a scholarly catalogue. Her auction history is thin, recent, and inconsistently reported across market databases, so any single result should be read against a small and still-forming sample rather than as a stable trend line. At the same time, her current representation, together with a history of gallery exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery and Fredericks & Freiser and acquisitions by SFMOMA, the MFA Boston, and other institutions, points to a market being actively built on institutional footing rather than on auction speculation alone.