Member’s Spotlight Exhibition: Gretchen Durst Jacobs: What the Body Carries

Gretchen Durst Jacobs: What the Body Carries features new work from the Dayton-based artist. These encaustic monotypes, which merge painting with printmaking, emanate from the body, using gesture, scale, and repetition to explore how experience is physically and emotionally carried. Her abstract compositions balance intuition and structure, with grids often acting as quiet frameworks that hold movement, memory, and sensation in tension. Each encaustic monotype, created through a process that uses hot wax and pigment transferred onto a surface, is unique, and invites viewers to contemplate how feeling takes shape through mark, color, and rhythm.

Artist Statement

My paintings and prints begin with the body. Rooted in somatic experience and attentive to the inner life, the work explores how feeling is carried, processed, and transformed through physical gesture. I often work at a scale that matches my full reach—fingertip to fingertip—so each mark records movement, presence, and intuition. At times a grid enters the work as a quiet stabilizing force, allowing chaos, memory, and motion to coexist within a shared structure.

Although abstract, the work is grounded in more than twenty-five years of painting from direct observation. What has long drawn me to the landscape is how closely it mirrors human experience—its resilience and adaptation, its tenderness, and its moments of tension. Through color, gesture, and layered marks, I move through lived experience as a continuum, allowing feeling to take shape. Each work is an attempt to reconcile emotion with form, to honor what we carry, and to give shape to what cannot always be spoken.

All artworks in this exhibition are available for purchase. Please visit the reception desk or speak to a Staff member to purchase. Proceeds support both the artist and The Contemporary Dayton’s mission to connect artists and audiences through accessible, engaging contemporary art experiences.

About the Artist

Gretchen Durst Jacobs creates abstract paintings and prints, often utilizing a grid and bold, gestural marks to explore our relationship with the self and the natural world. She received her MFA from the University of Cincinnati in 2008 and her BFA from Wright State University in 2000. She attended the New York Studio School for Drawing and Painting Marathons and Summer Sessions in 2000 and 2003. In 2024, she received the Montgomery County Arts and Cultural District Individual Artist Grant.

Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Internationally. Regional exhibitions include the Dayton Museum of Art; Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; Dana L. Wiley Gallery, Dayton, OH; University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH; the Morgan Conservatory, Cleveland, OH; and Ohio Northern University, Ada, OH. Her international exhibitions include the Lambton Heritage Museum, Ontario, Canada; Alten Feuerwache Loschwitz and Grafikwerkstatt, Dresden, Germany; and the Dayton/Kyoto Print Exchange, Kyoto, Japan. She has permanent public art installations on view at the Dayton Metro Library and the Kettering Government Center.

She is represented by the Dana L. Wiley Gallery. Durst Jacobs works full time in her studio in Dayton, Ohio, and also maintains a studio in Ontario, Canada. Since 2017, she has served as the President of the Dayton Printmakers Cooperative.