Jesse Mockrin

Jesse Mockrin was born in 1981 in Silver Spring, Maryland. She earned a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University in 2003, where she studied visual art and art history, and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2011. Her practice takes canonical European figurative paintings, largely Baroque and Renaissance in origin, and extracts, crops, and recombines their figures and gestures into new compositions that read as suspended, ambiguous narratives rather than illustrations of a single source. Recurring concerns include the depiction of women's bodies, status, and agency within the history of painting itself.

She is represented by James Cohan in New York and Night Gallery in Los Angeles, and has held solo exhibitions at both, as well as at Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York and Galerie Perrotin in Seoul. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions including the 16th Biennale de Lyon in 2022. In 2025 the Art Gallery of Ontario opened Jesse Mockrin: Echo, her first major museum exhibition, running through early 2026, alongside a concurrent solo show of new drawings, First Romance, at James Cohan in New York. Most sources describe her as living and working in Los Angeles, though one institutional profile places her in Philadelphia; the artist's own site and gallery materials favor Los Angeles.

Mockrin's work has been covered by major art and culture publications, including The New Yorker, T Magazine, Modern Painters, Artforum, and Art in America, among others, largely in the context of her ongoing project of reworking Old Master and Baroque source material to foreground questions of gender and power that the original paintings often left unexamined. Critics and curators have consistently framed her fragmenting and recombining of historical imagery as a deliberate interruption of art-historical narrative rather than homage, a reading reinforced by the Art Gallery of Ontario's decision to mount her first museum survey around this body of work in 2025.

Mockrin's auction market is small but has grown quickly. Her current public auction high is A Cymbal Crashed and Roaring Horns (2017), which sold for GBP 120,650 (about USD 153,949) at Phillips London on 7 March 2024, a result Phillips described as a new world auction record for the artist. Industry coverage points to an earlier high near USD 113,400 at Christie's in 2023, though the specific work and exact sale date are not confirmed in available sources. Either way, the gap between her recent results reflects a market that is still thinly traded and can move sharply on a single strong sale.

Mockrin has no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and attribution rest on her gallery representation and documented exhibition history rather than a published scholarly record. Her auction history is limited to a small number of sales concentrated in the last few years, so any single result, including her 2024 record, should be read against a thin comparison set rather than as evidence of a stable price trend. Her recent institutional momentum, particularly the 2025 to 2026 Art Gallery of Ontario survey, is the more durable signal for collectors weighing her long-term standing.