Jackie Gendel’s new paintings present contemporary interpretations of cosmopolitan dramas. Providing a whimsical take on portrait painting, Gendel’s work begs the question, both to her subjects and to viewers alike, “Does she know?”. With a humorous and malleable relationship to the answer, Gendel explores the unseen and informational characteristics that define conventional portraiture. A painterly mélange of historical facts, social clues and simple narrative details coalesce with pictorial abstraction to give her portraits their currency as objects of speculation. The poetics of silence, gossip, and hearsay all play key roles in the formulation of her artistic syntax; Does She Know? plays with the phenomena of secrecy and storytelling through the process of painting.