Jenny Morgan at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles: Hours at the Edge Brings Muses and Birds of Prey Into Focus

An owl stares out of a canvas, and in the dark wet discs of its eyes there are tiny reflections of people — whoever, presumably, was standing in front of it when it was painted. It is a small detail, but it says a lot about Jenny Morgan’s “Hours at the Edge” at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles, on view from 13 November 2026 to 16 January 2027. Morgan has spent her career painting the people she knows best. Now she has added creatures that look back.

The exhibition of new oil paintings is Morgan’s second solo show with Anat Ebgi and her first in Los Angeles. It opens with a reception on Friday 13 November, 6–8pm, at the gallery’s Wilshire Boulevard space.

Jenny Morgan: a painter of returning faces

Born in Salt Lake City in 1982, Morgan studied at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver before completing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York; she lives and works in Brooklyn. Her first solo museum exhibition, “Skin Deep”, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2017, and her work is in collections including the Denver Art Museum, ICA Miami and MOCA Jacksonville.

What distinguishes her is fidelity — not to photographic accuracy, though she can deliver that, but to people. She paints the same models again and again over years, and the gallery frames the practice as a long meditation on the artist–muse relationship. In its words, painting is for Morgan “a means of getting to know her subjects”. The repeated sitters accumulate history on canvas the way friends accumulate history in life.

The falconry and the new bestiary

The new element here is the birds. To prepare, Morgan returned repeatedly to a falconry in Upstate New York to observe falcons and owls at close range. Birds of prey are an inspired choice for a portraitist: their faces are fixed and inexpressive, yet their attention is total. In one painting, The Connector, a falcon’s outstretched wings fold around a partially hidden human face, so that bird and sitter become one composite image — protector, mask or predator, depending on how long you look.

Elsewhere, faces emerge from dense fur, folds of fabric and drifting vapour. Morgan sets unlike textures in rhyme — hair and flame, foliage and feathers, wood and water — to suggest that human, animal and landscape are continuous rather than separate categories. Some forms are fragmentary, mask- or statue-like, floating in fields of atmospheric colour.

Holding the illusion, then letting it go

Technically, the paintings are built on a deliberately restricted palette. Morgan sustains a realist illusion for as long as she can and then lets painterly marks break through it, so that a cheek in sharp focus gives way to a passage of loose, almost abstract brushwork. The effect is close to the way memory works: a few details vivid, the rest dissolving.

The centrepiece, according to the gallery, is The Stranger, a monumental blue-green female nude lying on satin. Her hair melts into darkness while a shaft of white light falls on her thigh. It knowingly echoes the long Western tradition of the reclining nude, but the reading Morgan’s text offers is spiritual rather than erotic: the body as a vessel, and the suggestion of a soul in the act of leaving it.

There is also a sculptural impulse at work. Stitched spirals and exposed, tacked canvas edges remind viewers that a painting is a physical thing. The spiral — a recurring symbol of spirit — doubles as a sign of passage between the material and the immaterial.

Anat Ebgi and the Los Angeles moment

Anat Ebgi has become one of the Los Angeles galleries most closely associated with contemporary figurative painting, and Morgan has already appeared in group shows there, including “If you forget my name, you will go astray”. A first solo presentation in the city lands at a time when LA collectors and institutions are giving sustained attention to new figuration — and when the conversation has shifted from whether figurative painting is back to what it can still do. Morgan’s answer is to slow looking down.

Why it matters for painters and collectors

For painters, the show is a lesson in calibrated finish: where to resolve a form completely and where to abandon it. Morgan’s exposed edges and stitched elements are also a useful provocation for anyone who treats the canvas as a neutral window. For collectors, it marks a clear development in a mid-career practice with institutional backing — the introduction of animal subjects is a genuine expansion of her vocabulary, not a stylistic tweak. Works at the scale of The Stranger are likely to be the anchor pieces of this body of work.

Visiting information

Anat Ebgi, 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. 13 November 2026 – 16 January 2027; opening reception Friday 13 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday–Saturday 10am–5pm; phone +1 323 272 3418; [email protected]. See our Jenny Morgan exhibition listing and the official exhibition page, and explore more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.