Benjamin Kress "Somebody, Anybody, Nobody"
Callicoon Fine Art
This event has ended.
In Kress's luminous works the mask serves as a potent symbol of mortality and transformation, extending the genres of self-portraiture and allegorical painting. The exhibition's largest painting takes Gauguin’s late masterpiece about the cycle of life as a starting point, repopulating the figures in the post-impressionist's work with Kress's own masked figures. Simultaneously vacant and idealized, the faces are part of a constellation of characters whose features include those borrowed from well-known fashion models.
By way of the masks (sculpted, cast, and worn by the artist himself), existential questions are reworked and cryptic responses are posited by whatever identities the masked figures might embody. What are they? Where do they come from and why? These questions assert themselves in a painting of the artist wearing an eyeless mask, sitting on the studio couch. Seen in profile, legs crossed, the figure in this portrait turns to meet our gaze. In another painting of a mask that fills the picture plane, a condensation of moisture is caught under the plastic skin, refracting light into a colorful spectrum. The spectrum is picked up again in a painting of sinuous figurative forms in red, green and blue, overlaid like shadows within the studio space.
Throughout the exhibition the refinement of construction, including artist-made frames and glass overlays for the paintings, creates a visual specificity that contrasts with the ambiguity and unexpected quality of the subject matter. Kress’s high degree of craft serves as an anchor for work that illustrates an uncanny vision and explores the complexity of subjectivity.
Born 1976 in Bozeman, MT, Benjamin Kress lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He attended The Cooper Union, New York, NY (BFA 2000), and The Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT (MFA 2004).
[Image: Benjamin Kress "Condensation Mask" (detail) (2011) oil on canvas with glass overlay, artist’s frame, 20 x 16 in.]
Media
Schedule
from December 09, 2011 to January 22, 2012
Opening Reception on 2011-12-09 from 18:00 to 20:00