The Philadelphia-born and New York-based artist’s paintings are fraught portraits and still lifes that manage to be both precise and indirect, with an intensity that finds its focus in small details, whether a pair of folded hands or the fold of cloth under a bent knee. Her work was included this year in the triennial Prospect 5 in New Orleans, as well as a solo show now reopened at MoCA Los Angeles. Most prominently, though, was her substantial retrospective, which opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London in May, and toured to the Whitney Museum in New York in October. Common among the works included were aspects of friendship, memory and grief, though they also retained an ambivalent distance from the sitters, as if not wanting to pry. ‘I have access to surface, and to social dynamics,’ Packer has said. Among those artists painting the Black body, Packer’s work provides a quiet reordering of what we can see in portraiture.