Julia Benjamin “Some more (black & white) paintings”

The National Exemplar

This event has ended.

In the mill’s dream of itself, gray-scaled slugs inch their way through an apparatus known as the twittering machine. A shuffling turbine rigged from rope, painted timber, and tin sheets, periodically broadcasts a satellite of achromatic blooms. The water-stains on a limestone wall are like Ishihara tests rendered in black and white. Outside rills the inky brook flecked by lightning—burlap bags, cogs, striped canes, and rolled coins are strewn around a whitish fire.

-Owen Westberg

“Some more (black & white) paintings” is Julia Benjamin’s second exhibition at the gallery.

On view will be a selection of small-scale oil paintings from 2012 to the present. Benjamin recently moved her studio from an industrial building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn to a barn in a historic mill town in rural New Jersey.

Motifs from her vocabulary of abstracted images are painted using a variety of techniques, from rich impasto to diluted, veiled transparencies, in mixed tones of black & white.

While the early Brooklyn works are thick and heavy, the later works are light and airy, revealing that maybe her abstractions are not really such, but rather a depiction of a landscape or environment the artist is seeing, that only we cannot recognize.

Julia Benjamin (born 1984 in New York, NY) received her MFA from Columbia University in 2012. Selected exhibitions include a 2016 solo exhibition, “Some Paintings,” at 247365, New York; and group exhibitions at Jack Hanley, New York; Croy Nielsen, Berlin; Carl Louie, London, Ontario; Auto Body; Bellport, NY; and White Flag Projects, St. Louis. She currently works in Sussex County, NJ.