Benjamin Senior — Artifice
2nd June — 21st July 2012
Opening Friday, 1st June 2012, 6 – 8 pm
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).