Bill Jensen is a contemporary American painter whose abstract works consist of biomorphic forms and sophisticated color arrangements. Influenced by Eastern philosophy and the brooding paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Jensen’s compositions are meditatively worked and reworked. Born in 1945 in Minneapolis, MN, he received both his BFA and MFA from the University of Minnesota. Jensen came into prominence in the late 1970s in New York City. His work was exhibited at the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, at the Whitney Museum of American Art including 1981 Whitney Biennial, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Considered a third generation Abstract Expressionist painter, Bill Jensen makes work –often inspired by Chinese poetry and Buddhism – that seeks to ignite areas of the psyche and memory and create powerful emotional connections. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Clyfford Still are all touchstones for Jensen’s vigorous, landscape-like abstractions, where shape, line, and intense color follow unpredictable yet harmonious paths. Unlike many of the painters of his generation, Jensen has not developed and maintained a signature style, but prefers to let the process of making each piece determine the direction of the image. “Change is good for art but hard on the artist," he says.
Jensen's work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Tate, London, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Jensen has lived and worked in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn since 1976.