31/5/2012
Benjamin Senior
BolteLang, Zurich
Artifice. The artist has created a new body of work depicting a formal play of rhythms, false symmetries and colour relationships: moments of physical exercise in an environment reminiscent of a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
Artifice is Benjamin Senior’s (UK, 1982) first exhibition at BolteLang, for which he
has created a new body of work depicting a formal play of rhythms, false symmetries
and colour relationships. He meticulously combines these elements to depict moments
of physical exercise in an environment reminiscent of a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
The subjects’ moments of movement are used as a springboard for exploring the
implications of the body when fixed within a flattened space.
Senior’s geometrised subjects in the context of sport and exercise, allow the artist to
indulge both in abstract pattern and the rendering of the human body. The small scale
of the work creates an intimate space in which to contemplate depiction of energy and
movement on a static, two-dimensional surface. Senior’s engrossment with geometric
forms and duality is evident in the depiction of his characters in twos or multiples
thereof.
The title Artifice merely hints at the cunning and skilful craftiness of this body of work.
Viewers of Senior’s work can clearly sense the artist’s enjoyment of control – over the
exacting medium of egg tempera; over the configuration of the body; over the system
of hard-edged colours and shapes that characterise his work. The viewer is invited into
a world where with his surgical precision and wry humour, Senior probes ambiguous
areas of our notion of healthy lifestyle, ideal beauty and visual pleasure.
Senior’s paintings are nuanced by everyday observations, yet amplify the numeric and
geometric nature of our everyday perception. By placing an emphasis on observational
drawing rather than photography as the preparation for painting, it is with minute
precision that he arranges his athletic and geometric subject matter across a previously
shallow picture plain.
After receiving a BA in Painting from the Wimbledon School of Art Benjamin Senior completed his
Masters of Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2010. Since 2006 he has had various exhibitions, both
group and solo. Some of the more recent exhibitions include his debut in New York Ella Kruglyanskaya and
Benjamin Senior, James Fuentes LLC, New York, USA and solo exhibition Breathless, Studio 106, London,
UK, Polemically Small, curated by Edward Lucie-Smith, Klaipeda Culture Communication Centre,
Lithuania, and Charlie Sierra Lima, Charlie Smith, London, UK. In 2010 he won the Gordon Luton Prize
for Painting and in 2011 was a resident artist at Kingsgate Workshops Trust Residency. In June 2012 Senior
will be represented at LISTE The Young Art Fair in Basel by BolteLang (booth G5).
For further information and images, please contact
:
t +41 (0) 44 273 00 10
Anna Bolte anna@boltelang.com
Caroline Lommaert caroline@boltelang.com
Opening Friday, 1st June 2012, 6 – 8 pm
BolteLang
Limmatstrasse 214 - 8005 Zürich - Switzerland
wed-fri 12-6pm, sat 12-5pm