Launch Point
The concepts of time and space are both an entry and departure for Amorelle Jacox who draws out enigma from the shadows of her seven new paintings.
Family Style
May 1, 2026
Words by Hindley Wang
Amorelle Jacox. Image courtesy of the artist and Management.Upon returning from Artemis II’s mission around the Moon last month, astronaut Christina Koch was struck not only by the beauty of Earth, but “how much blackness there was around it.” This same vast nothingness is the catalyst for Amorelle Jacox’s practice. In her new solo exhibition, “Mothers of Time,” at Management in New York, the artist presents a chamber of seven paintings (all completed this year) that mediate temporality through the artist’s own body—with each canvas scaled to her 5’2” frame. As a result, a slanted gravity punctures the work, tracing the instability of the self as it disperses into the infinite continuum.
Inside the Chinatown gallery, the artist’s canvases move between the intimate and the infinite and the passage of color appears both delimited and grounded. With careful layering and fusion, Jacox conjures an emotional gravity evocative of a Mark Rothko-esque glow. Layers of figuration and abstraction are set in constant pull, as the elusive fields embed, undermine, and swallow androgynous figures. Stable symbolism is debased. In Number (mother), 2026, a cloaked figure slits open a dark field of saturated layers of indigo and red, revealing an aperture of light emanating within. The person holds the heart of the beam around their chest, while reaching for an hourglass emblem. A narrow measuring scale rests underfoot. “I am thinking about naming, the ways of quantification and organization, and the limitations,” the artist says. Matter (mother), 2026, one of the last paintings that she completed for the show, features two tiny whirlpools that punctuate the top corners of the canvas. A color wheel centers the composition, shadowed by an hourglass diagram that funnels into a fantastical black hole at the lower register. A figure disappears into the scene. It is a curious circuit of celestial disembodiment.
Amorelle Jacox, Number (mother), 2026. Image courtesy of the artist and Management.Jacox’s fascination with the cosmos goes back to her childhood spent stargazing in Dayton, Ohio where she grew up, punctuated by visits with family in rural Oklahoma. Encouraged by her artist mother, she began painting at a young age. In 2022, Jacox was named a finalist for the Hopper Prize, the same year she graduated from Hunter College with an M.F.A. in Studio Art. In the four years since, she has had numerous presentations in Europe and the U.S. Now based in Brooklyn, the 31-year-old painter still returns to those early existential inquiries from a childhood spent staring into the deep low-hanging night: What is time’s mother? Where is time birthed? “If time comes from many elements, and time is my first mother, then I am also born into and from all of these elements,” she concludes.
Installation view of “Amorelle Jocax: Mothers of Time.” Image courtesy of the artist and Management.Each of her new paintings grapple with the origin of life, a concept of birth separate from the gendered connotations of motherhood. Throughout her practice, Jacox has worked within the strain of the celestial and the corporeal, always returning to time. The painter points to the challenges of such charting that have prevailed across civilizations, from the Babylonian calendar to modern astronomy. Through her work, she proposes her own cosmic taxonomy. “My experience of time does not feel tied to any one element,” she says. “Time itself feels spread out and deep. Everywhere and nowhere.” In this light, all her paintings are transcriptions of what is essentially a mapping of time traced by the carnal. “I wanted to open them up in a way that my body would understand them, to find where bits of them are lodged in myself,” says Jacox.