NYAB Event - Sallie Benton “Paint-Drawings”

Sallie Benton “Paint-Drawings”

First Street Gallery

This event has ended.

From large scale studies of the human face to delicate still lives, Benton works between figuration and abstraction, translating familiar subjects of painting into thoughtful meditations on themes of difference, identity, self-presentation, and varying notions of beauty.

Benton’s images of friends, family and fellow artists are characterized by a sense of something just beneath the surface. Uniformly cropped and pressed close to the picture plane, each individual acquires an monumentality’s well as a sense of intimacy. Shifts in touch, saturation, and mark-making gesture toward a visceral, psychological element persisting behind each contained, publicly presented face.

The artist describes the works as “paint-drawings,” emphasizing the combination of concentrated observation and immediacy with layered areas and open linearity by which she composes her subjects. Often working both with and against a gridded surface, Benton’s images achieve a formal likeness or replication enlivened by inventive color juxtapositions and a loose, painterly vocabulary: a mouth demarcated by a languid, linear stroke of a mustache, a young girl’s cheekbones summarized by generous swaths of pink acrylic atop the smooth Acrylite surface, like butter spread on a biscuit.

Also on view will be a series of flower paintings, which extend the artist’s interest in this dialogue of differences.

Paint-Drawings is Sallie Benton’s seventh one-person exhibition at First Street Gallery. Her work has also been shown at several important public venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Parrish Art Museum. She recently participated in the exhibition Come Together: Surviving Hurricane Sandy (2013). Her work has been reviewed in major publications, including the New York Times and Art in America. Benton received an MFA from Yale School of Art. The artist currently lives and works in New York.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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