Trudy Benson 2021

TRUDY BENSON

TRUDY BENSON

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

AT THE LIMITS OF POSSIBILITY

By Charlotte Jansen Why does someone become an abstract artist today? The question rushes impatiently past my lips when I speak to Trudy Benson.

You see, to me, abstract art is ripe for a reckoning: From the early Expressionists to the Supremacists to the Neoplasticists to, of course, the Action painters, the trajectory over more than a century has always had the boozy whiff of machismo and a kind of unsteady swagger. (Indeed, the canon’s most famous artists are men.) Abstract art’s proclamation of freedom and intellectual grandeur has seemed privileged and cocksure. In short, I’ve found it off-putting.

But Benson’s work surprises me. It turns out that abstraction can be a slow-burning attraction—one that makes more sense when you are less attached to it making sense and when you rely more on your visceral senses.

Benson grew up in Virginia, and close contact with famous works of art in real life would come later, in New York. She was in her twenties and attending graduate school at Pratt Institute when she had her first in-person encounter with the works of one of her “personal heroes,” the American artist Elizabeth Murray, the most unpretentious and “goofy” (in Jessica Hagedorn’s words) of abstract painters. Until that live encounter with Murray’s works, Benson took most of her cues from photography—as many young painters do today. Yet, as was the case with many people of earlier generations, there came a point when Benson became tired of looking— exhausted by the idea of finding “content,” of trying to shoehorn the ineffable into a recognizable, reproducible, reducible image.

So Benson delved deeper into the possibilities of painting, into the substance of surfaces, into the delicious suggestiveness of shapes and textures, and into lines in free fall. Versed as she is in art history, Benson concedes that her process isn’t exactly intuitive, and many of her predecessors’ methods converge in her work. But at the same time, these paintings are “puzzles I have to solve,” as she puts it, like The

3

New York Times crossword she does every day. Painting abstractly can be a small triumph in a world that seems unconscionable. It might take the viewer away from the crudeness of reality and toward something that might be more like the truth. As Philip Guston put it, “Nothing is more boring in the world than making pictures. What you want is an experience—of making something that you haven’t seen before.”

4

That is no mean feat nowadays, when everything seems to have been done before and seen twice over. In Benson’s punchy-colored paintings, the viewer is bounced vertiginously around, like the Olympic skateboarder Nyjah Huston flying down rails and curbs. Your sense of gravity, of where your feet touch the ground, is shaken as you stand. The paintings, fizzing with energy, popping with colors (each painting is loosely based on an analogous palette, often interrupted by an unexpected flash, a wobbly line in canary yellow here, a succulent orange stripe there), always land us back inside the work, as if we are in a visual pinball machine. We want to stay inside the work, to explore it. And no matter where we land, something new appears, some detail that hadn’t revealed itself before: a scumbling effect, drips, brushstrokes, and marks left by the many other things Benson likes to apply paint with—traditional painting tools as well as unconventional items she picks up at dollar stores that have become pivotal to her practice. There are traces of an airbrush, a roller, a palette knife. These details speak to Benson’s own playfulness and lack of pretention—fun was had here, and you can feel it. “It’s my solace,” Benson says.

Each painting, Benson explains, begins with the geometric layer, acrylic applied to the canvas with a brush, but then attacked with masking tape, so that when the next tool comes in, the airbrush, it tackles the negative space that has been left. The ephemeral effect of airbrush painting means the second layer sinks into the canvas and in fact appears to the viewer to be the first layer. The point of all these actions is that the temporal rhythm of the painting confuses the viewer—both time and space are destabilized.

Yet these traces and movements can be fully perceived only in person. This, again, is deliberate on Benson’s part. Born in 1985, she was among the first of the artists working today who painted on a computer before she painted on a canvas. In her paintings, this comes through in nostalgic hints of 1980s graphic design and pixel art

in unsaturated grey, checkered patterns, and warped segments. The small screens of her adolescence, where time and space were also contorted, take on new dimensions and different resonances when they are blown up large. The evidence and effort of the artist’s hand, the tactile results of her labor, have to be seen in person.

Only then do you feel the texture of her impasto lines, which forge connections with Jonathan Lasker, or discover the way a squeegee has passed over the canvas, à la Gerhard Richter. These are all fundamental elements of Benson’s paintings.

This new body of work, created over the past year at Benson’s Brooklyn studio, sees a distinct shift, away from the hard-edge influences and more rigid geometry found in her previous work and toward more fluidity and an interest in bending space, using optical effects to warp and disorient. There are undulating waves, ripples, and stacks that either go up or tumble down on the viewer, depending on how optimistic you are. This interest in dimensionality is riveting—considering that all of Benson’s early interactions with art were either through magazines or screens.

5

In psychedelic, hypnotic works like Peach Ultimate, some forms and patterns (inspired partly by vintage Emilio Pucci dresses) sink back while others seem to lurch forward into space. The effect is achieved, Benson says, by switching airbrushes, which allows her to hone the layers in new ways. Benson does offer breathers from this intensity, in the form of two black “windows”—black holes into an infinity, or what the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti might have called the “inexpressible nothing,” the gap between what exists and what is cultivated, between ourselves and others. Pulling the eye up and down, throwing us off center, the painting forces us to grapple with space and with our place in it.

The collaged effect of Minty Stack, meanwhile, refers to Louis Cane’s Toile Découpée, a series of cutout paintings that the French artist embarked upon in 1971, works that Benson is especially moved by. Cane would paint on the floor, in the manner of the masters of Abstract Expressionism, but in the Toile Découpée paintings he added his own flourish by cutting a flap into the canvas that would reveal a space when the painting was hanging on the wall. Cane was interested in inspiring thinking about what was not represented, and how it might be incorporated into the work. Minty Stack has its own synergy—a jubilant vibe and a staccato rhythm that vies with

Louis Cane, Toile découpée, 1971, Oil on canvas, 94 1/2 x 74 3/8 x 38 5/8 inches, 240 x 189 x 98 cm, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

6

curves and straight lines for attention. They shouldn’t work together, but they do. In Bodies Meeting, Benson brings together all the aspects of her visual vernacular: the impasto lines (each on their own path), the geometric stacks (moving on a checkered sea). If you look at it long enough—and this is what Benson’s paintings encourage—you feel it moving, with the apparently disparate parts meeting, holding hands, and joining forces. The Reflection Is the Opposite, one of the more orderly works in this exhibition, evokes a similar feeling, with the blue impasto forming an unbroken line.

Of course, the symmetry is askew and the reflection is not an opposite reflection.

With a glint in her eye, though, Benson asks, “But what if …?”

What if we suspended disbelief, what if we let go—let the world take us where it wants to? What I’ve come to realize while spending time with Benson’s paintings is that I, too, have grown weary of looking, of consuming content, of knowing the answers immediately. Cynical eyes expect to be deceived, but there is no trick in these paintings. The artist presents the puzzles she has solved, and what is on display delights. Wander the mazes and fall down the rabbit holes. Free of the shackles of the ordinary, Benson provides an escape from the pedestrian, from the walls that threaten to close in.

Why be an abstract artist? The answer is in the paintings, and they are our puzzle to solve.

Charlotte Jansen is an arts and culture journalist and the author of Girl on Girl and Photography Now. She is the Commissioning Editor of Elephant magazine.

7

8

Bodies Meeting, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 77 x 66 inches 195.6 x 167.6 cm

10

Have You Seen Me?, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas 36 x 36 inches 91.4 x 91.4 cm

12

How to Make a Fruit Battery, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 56 x 50 inches 142.2 x 127 cm

14

Lime Cairn, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 77 x 66 inches 195.6 x 167.6 cm

16

Minty Stack, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 64 x 58 inches 162.6 x 147.3 cm

18

Oddly Satisfying, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 64 x 58 inches 162.6 x 147.3 cm

20

Peach Ultimate, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 77 x 66 inches 195.6 x 167.6 cm

22

Recliner, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas 77 x 66 inches 195.6 x 167.6 cm

24

Skylla, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas 47 x 43 inches 119.4 x 109.2 cm

26

Slide or Skid, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas 37 x 32 inches 94 x 81.3 cm

28

Tessellate, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas 64 x 58 inches 162.6 x 147.3 cm

30

The Reflection is the Opposite, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas 56 x 50 inches 142.2 x 127 cm

32

The Shape of Lightning, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas 56 x 54 inches 142.2 x 137.2 cm

34

TV at Night, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 77 x 66 inches 195.6 x 167.6 cm

36

Twin, 2021

Acrylic and oil on canvas 66 x 61 inches 167.6 x 154.9 cm

38

Updrift, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 77 x 66 inches 195.6 x 167.6 cm

40

Upward Descent, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 66 x 61 inches 167.6 x 154.9 cm

42

What Stands Behind, 2021 Acrylic and oil on canvas 56 x 50 inches 142.2 x 127 cm

44

TRUDY BENSON Born in Richmond, VA in 1985 Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

EDUCATION 2010 MFA, Pratt Institute, New York, NY 2007 BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “/ Z / Z /,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Étienne, France 2020 “Join,” Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden 2018 “Cuts, Paints,” team(bungalow), Los Angeles, CA “Closer Than They Appear,” Lyles & King, New York, NY “Infinite Spiral,” Dio Horia, Mykonos, Greece 2017 Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland “Garden in Motion,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Paris, France 2016 “Cosmicomics,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg “Spooky Action at a Distance,” Half Gallery, New York, NY 2015 “Shapes of Things,” Lisa Cooley, New York, NY 2013 “PAINT,” Horton Gallery, New York, NY 2011 “Actual/Virtual,” Mike Weiss Gallery, New York, NY

2010 “Space Jam,” Freight + Volume, New York, NY GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2021 “Wild Frontiers,” The Pit, Los Angeles, CA “Unearthed by JC” (curated by Joe Chira), Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL “Her Dark Materials” (curated by Philly Adams), Wolverton Works Virtual Art Museum, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom “Phase One,” The Hole, East Hampton, NY “Light” (curated by Rico Gatson), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Path of the Storm,” SUNNY NY, New York, NY “Group Show,” RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland “Join,” Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden 2020 “Accrochage,” RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland “True Lines,” Over the Influence, Los Angeles, CA “100!” Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden 2019 “Decoy” (curated by Marc Mitchell), Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR “New Edition: Print from the Past, Present, and Future at Pratt” (curated by Caitlin Riordan and Grayson Cox), Pratt Institute, New York, NY “Rise,” RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland “le ciel, l’eau, les dauphins, la vierge, les flics, le sang des nobles, l’ONU, l’Europe, les casques bleus, Facebook, Twitter,” Forde, Geneva, Switzerland 2018 “MOONDOG,” East Hampton Shed, East Hampton, NY “10 Years in Luxembourg,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Wandhaff, Luxembourg “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY “Group Exhibition,” Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2017 “Come as You Are,” Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal, Canada “Post Analog Painting II,” The Hole, New York, NY

45

“Pro-Forma: Context and Meaning in Abstraction” (curated

by Vittorio Colaizzi), Work Release Gallery, Norfolk, VA “Unobstructed Views,” Hawkins Ferry House, Grosse Pointe Shores, MI “TT52” (with Yann Gerstberger), Lyles & King, New York, NY 2016 “Bodacioussss,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO “Re-Planetizer” (curated by The Pit), Regina Rex, New York, NY “Splotch,” Sperone Westwater, New York, NY “The City & The City,” Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY “Non Figuration - un regain d’Intérêt?,” Centre d’art, Meymac, France “9999,” The Fireplace Project, East Hampton, NY “Image Tech: Making Pictures in a Post-Digital Age” (curated

by Mauro Zamora), The Art Gallery at the College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ

46

2015 “PaintersNYC,” Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico and Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, Oaxaca, Mexico “Feed the Meter,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Wandhaff, Luxembourg “Let’s Go Away for Away for Awhile” (curated by Erik den Breejen and Maria Calandra), One Mile Gallery, Kingston, NY “Swingers WKND” (curated by Tribble & Mancenido), New York, NY “Anti-Fair,” Harper’s Books at The Carlyle, New York, NY “Post-Analog Painting,” The Hole, New York, NY “Trudy Benson/Russell Tyler,” Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, NY “East Hampton Shed” (curated with Russell Tyler), East Hampton, NY 2014 “Go With the Flow,” The Hole, New York, NY “Sunscreen,” James Graham & Sons, New York, NY “Abstract American Today,” Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom “OK Great Thanks This is So Ridiculous,” ACME, Los Angeles, CA and DCKT, New York, NY “This One’s Optimistic: Pincushion,” New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, CT

“Material Images,” Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, NY “The Last Brucennial,” Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York, NY 2013 “Merge Visible,” Horton Gallery, New York, NY “SPLAZITCH,” Side Effects Gallery, New York, NY “Paint On, Paint Off,” Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY “Windows,” Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY “XSTRACTION,” The Hole, New York, NY “Paradox Maintenance Technicians,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2012 “Aggro Crag,” Bosi Contemporary, New York, NY “Where My Cones At?” (curated by Ryan Travis Christian), Double Break, San Diego, CA “Pratt Alumni Painters,” Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, NY “Spindles” (curated by the BLAAAHg), New York, NY “WET WET” (curated by the BLAAAHg), New York, NY “Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation New Acquisitions and Prints,” Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ “Idealizing the Imaginary: Illusion and Invention in Contemporary Painting,” Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI 2010 “Behind the Green Door,” DNA Gallery, Provincetown, MA “Pratt MFA Exhibition,” Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, NY 2009 “Fervor,” Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY “Down Below It’s Chaos,” ArtJail, New York, NY “A Piece,” LABA Artists’ Space at the 14th Street Y, New York, NY 2008 “Refinement,” Aswoon Gallery, New York, NY “Studio 23 Presents LOL the Command BFF 4EVA Portfolio,” Transmission Gallery, Richmond, VA “Transmission Introduces Studio 23,” Transmission Gallery, Richmond, VA 2007 “24/7 Fire in the Hole,” Plant Zero Art Center, Richmond, VA

AWARDS

SELECT COLLECTIONS

2014 Nominee, Painters and Sculptors Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York, NY

Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon

2012 Painting Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY

Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME

Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Arts, Peekskill, NY

Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom

LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS 2021 Visiting Artist Lecture, Hunter College, New York, NY Visiting Artist, Pratt Institute, New York, NY 2019 Visiting Artist Lecture, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 2018 “20 Questions with Trudy Benson,” Pratt Institute, New York, NY 2016 Image Tech Panel, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ 2015 Guest Critic, Bruce High Quality Foundation UnIversity, New York, NY 2014 Visiting Artist Lecture, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI 2013 Visiting Artist Lecture, Alfred University, Alfred, NY Artist Talk, Brooklyn Artist Space, New York, NY 2012 MFA Alumni Panel Series, Pratt Institute, New York, NY Visiting Artist Lecture, LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD 2011 Guest Lecture, Pratt Institute, New York, NY

47

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

TRUDY BENSON 21 October – 27 November 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2021 Charlotte Jansen Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Dan Bradica, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-61-8 Cover: Bodies Meeting, (detail), 2021