Enclosure / Benjamin Senior
January 12 - February 21 2015
Grey Noise, Dubai
Grey Noise is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Benjamin Senior in the Middle East.
Senior's paintings depict wholesome activities of exercise, play and walking in nature. His healthy figures inhabit a geometric, structured world. Even the verdant landscapes are brought to order with crisply delineated fields and forests. Yet tensions run through the paintings to give a sense of a structure on the brink of collapse.
The enclosure of the show's title refers to the artist's attempt to create a contained world in which his thoughts on representation, formalism and narrative can play out.
Senior uses the materials and methods of the Italian Renaissance, initially exploring his motifs with egg tempera on small panels, then developing his ideas with oil paint on larger canvases. Arrangements of figures are inspired by fragments of paintings by Carpaccio and Veronese. Yet his painterly language owes just as much to the Modernism of 1930's Europe, from the English rural visions of Stanley Spencer to the regimented urban crowds of the Cologne Progressives. Senior's paintings depict contemporary activity yet seem to occupy a moment outside of the normal stream of time.
The depicted actions find their parallels in the painter's practice. Repetition, balance, control... the painterly exercise meets physical exercise. Teenagers playing with hula hoops inhabit an abstracted, dreamlike world in which the only true narrative is the play of color and contrast, surface and depth and the rhythmic interactions of layered patterns. The hula hoop becomes a color wheel. Elsewhere hikers in a anoramic landscape consult a map, soon to resume their journey though their destination is still unknown. The landscape they walk in is missing a sky, viewed from above and unfolding as if it were a map itself.
About the Artist
b. 1982, Southampton, UK
Benjamin Senior studied at Wimbledon School of Art in 2001 and Royal College of Art in 2008. His solo exhibitions include Monica de Cardenas, Milan (2014); Studio Voltaire, London (2014); Unnatural Order, James Fuentes, New York, USA (2013); Artifice, BolteLang, Zürich (2012); Ella Kruglyanskaya and Benjamin Senior, James Fuentes, New York, USA (2011). Senior’s selected group exhibitions include Suspicion - curated by Dan Coombs, Jerwood Space, (2014); Counterpoise, Kingsgate Gallery, London (2012); This is Tomorrow, Annarumma 404, Italy (2011) and Young Gods, Charlie Smith, London (2010). In 2010, Senior was awarded the Gordon Luton Prize for Painting and was an artist in residence at the Kingsgate Workshops Trust from 2011 – 2012.
Benjamin Senior is represented by BolteLang, Zürich and James Fuentes, New York
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