EXPO Chicago

High Noon is pleased to present a solo booth of new paintings and drawings by Jennifer Coates for EXPO Chicago 2026. Coates’s work combines post-industrial and ancient ruins into mystical landscapes where nature reclaims human history. The works follow a recent visit to the nearly inaccessible ruins of the Mahanoy Plane coal works in Pennsylvania. Fusing eco-feminist sensibility with visionary experience, she reconstructs places through sense and memory— sites of decay, ritual, and renewal. Her improvisational process is akin to divination, as she builds these worlds intuitively: offerings and relic-like fragments emerge from layers of mark-making and accident. Drawing on antiquity, baroque painting, and surrealism, each work stands as an elegy to the entanglement of nature, time, and the sacred.

 

A five foot square enclave located in the back left corner of the booth echoes the concept of the altar. Some two-dozen odd framed mixed media works on paper hang like votives in a salon-style cluster across three walls. Installed in close proximity, the works form a concentrated field in which elements from the larger paintings receive intimate, sacred attention like portable reliquaries.

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Jennifer Coates (b. Surrey, England) was the recipient of the John Koch Art Award in Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a NYFA Award in painting, a Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Sharpe Walentas Studio residency. Her work was included in The Brooklyn Artists Show at the Brooklyn Museum, and recent solo shows include This Compost at Tyler Park Presents, Los Angeles, in 2025, and Edge Effects in 2024 which spanned two galleries in NYC at High Noon and Chart. Her work has been written about in publications such as ArtForum, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, Art News, and others.