Divorcing Platitudes: Painting as Pure Sentiment
Jasmine Gregory, , Where dreams become reality (detail), 2025. Courtesy SOPHIE TAPPEINER and the artist. Image by kunstdokumentation.com.
Many people who attended museums and galleries in their younger years will hold something of a collective memory of being told not to touch artworks in the revered spaces in which they are displayed. Similarly, when being introduced to making art as a child, we are told to stay within the lines, inside the boundaries. Everything is well-behaved, traditional, adherent, and dogmatic toward unwritten rules, placing artists and curators on pedestals of the unreachable, the pure; surely closer to the divine.
The old scoffing aphorism of “my five-year-old could have done that” has long been employed, not least in recent decades, when the deceptively childlike, diaristic stylings of the likes of Tracey Emin, mixed with graphic depictions of adult life, have changed the visual arts. Being lauded by critics and institutions has drastically altered how the general public receive these supposedly simple forms of expression. Could your five-year-old have replicated the work of Katharina Grosse, perhaps the most renowned artist in the “expanded painting” medium? On a base level, potentially the answer is yes, but by even entertaining such an idea, we are surely losing sight of the process that comes before the paint can even touch the canvas, of the concepts and symbiotic relationships formed between artist and artwork, and most importantly, the raw emotion that fuels these outcomes.
Jasmine Gregory, Divorce no.3, 2025, Oil on linen, 90 x 110cm. Courtesy SOPHIE TAPPEINER and the artist. Image by kunstdokumentation.com.
Jasmine Gregory, Divorce no.12, 2025, Oil, studio dirt, glitter on linen, 90 x 110cm. Courtesy SOPHIE TAPPEINER and the artist. Image by kunstdokumentation.com.
A manifest of raw emotion could be found in the gallery space at Sophie Tappeiner in Vienna, when they hosted Diva’s Lounge, an exhibition by Zurich-based artist Jasmine Gregory. As soon as I walked into the space, I was drawn to Where dreams become reality, a site-specific artwork that adopted the aesthetic of the sort of rogue painting that screams “activism” or “rage.” From the viewer’s perspective, it engendered a kind of adrenaline-fuelled panic. It is a profoundly epic feeling to experience a full-blown chemical reaction in a gallery space, and a rare one at that. Something had occurred which had pushed the artist toward an explosion and expansion beyond the arbitrary confines of the canvas. It is the word “divorce,” which puts two fingers up at everything and everyone: the canvas, the gallery walls, the viewer, and any rudimentary etiquette that is again unspoken. Show this to a child who has been told how not to behave in museum and gallery settings, and their imagination might be ignited.
The energy the work emits becomes a bizarre but utterly transfixing world of hearsay and rumour, all fabricated in the minds of the viewer. The artist, perhaps, is planting the seed for speculative gossip, and we are all lapping it up. With a lack of grounding and context further cemented by the exhibition’s almost non-existent press release, where a sheet of paper presented a facsimile lipstick-stained kiss, it is all fair game. While we are left on tenterhooks by the lack of insight into the context behind the painting of the word “divorce,” the viewer is at once titillated and wrought with intrigue about not only the artwork, but the person behind the painting.
Jasmine Gregory, , Where dreams become reality, 2025. Courtesy SOPHIE TAPPEINER and the artist. Image by kunstdokumentation.com.
In an attempt to understand the artist in a rounded way, I took to Gregory’s (public) Instagram page in a bid to hear what the artist had to say, and I was not disappointed. We could consider Gregory’s expanded practice to transcend the High Art of contemporary painting and sculpture, extending into her Instagram account, especially her Stories. Here, she frequently posts authentically, to the point that it generates a parasocial response. Her content feels like that of a friend, a confidante, a narrator, albeit in a one-sided dialogue. I felt like I understood her better by witnessing the narrative that she produces outside of the polite boundaries of the gallery space. At the time of writing, her latest story epitomises the chaos of tragedy and live-streamed massacres curated in the same spaces as memes and Reels; she writes how her newsfeed is “Gaza and gays.” Perhaps it is a shameful transgression to make the jump from an artist’s institutional solo exhibition to their Instagram page, and then expect to trace a narrative from which to produce a critique. Similarly, we are in 2025 and public Instagram accounts are precisely that: public. Perhaps, this is a marriage (if you will) of the power of parasocial tools, the delight of reading the words of angry women who are demanding more, and my naivety in this delight.
Jasmine Gregory, Diva’s Lounge, installation view, 2025. Courtesy SOPHIE TAPPEINER and the artist. Image by kunstdokumentation.com.
Whereas the artist’s online presence is direct, unfiltered, and pointed, the mixed media painting of Where dreams become reality is tantalisingly chaotic in its refusal to tell the viewer exactly what is going on, and exactly what the artist is trying to convey. Comprising oil glitter, studio floor dirt, and Gucci lipstick, the precarious line between the sexy and chaotic sides of a woman is rendered visible. Whether this is a personal divulgence or an alter-ego being fictionalized through her practice is unclear, but the disorder is delicious, as the lipstick-drawn text continues beyond the canvas onto the walls of the gallery. The sense is very much that this is expansive through a pure, rampant need to make this work. Therein lie the spectres of automatism, street art, and feminist art histories.
Jasmine Gregory, Diva’s Lounge, installation view, 2025. Courtesy SOPHIE TAPPEINER and the artist. Image by kunstdokumentation.com.
Say the exhibition’s title quickly, and you’ll find yourself uttering the words “divorce lounge.” This is exactly where the painting Where dreams become reality transports you. It’s awkward, it’s messy, you’re not sure where you should be standing, and how. Short of a lawyer and endless reams of paperwork, the gallery is transformed into a divorce lounge, a space of separation and low-level anxiety, alloyed with a bubbling, agitated expression of rebellion and rage.
This vessel of expression is a unique experience for the viewer, highlighting the artist’s queering of intimate spaces, the limits of the space we think we can take up, and even the parameters of painting itself: no actual paint is used in the piece. That being said, there can be no doubt that Gregory’s practice conveys true gestures of painting. I love the idea of going back to ourselves as children, and telling the next generations: we can reject the prescriptive attitudes toward what painting can be; there are no rules.
Jasmine Gregory, Divorce no.18, 2025, Oil, acrylic, glitter on linen, 90 x 110cm. Courtesy SOPHIE TAPPEINER and the artist. Image by kunstdokumentation.com.