Aglaé Bassens “Surface Tension”

New York Art Residency & Studios Foundation (NARS)

This event has ended.

Aglaé Bassens is a still life painter whose work about presence and absence is inspired by her uprooted upbringing and her experiences as a foreigner or outsider. Having lived in Belgium, Sweden, England, Turkey and now in America, Bassens’ paintings reflect on how everyday objects and images can look strange from unusual perspectives, both literally and culturally.

In Surface Tension, Bassens returns to the motif of the palm tree which has inspired her for some time. Symbolic of exoticism and travel, but also overused and generic, they perform as a happy/sad motif that celebrates the sameness and difference as each tree becomes interchangeable for another. Repeated over everything from sofas to wallpaper and shirts, the palm trees lose their exoticism and become a mantra to banality. Despite the cheerful palette of the paintings, the sofas remain empty, the interiors unpopulated, and the shirts hang unworn and loose.