TRUDY BENSON
v 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 TRUDY BENSON
TRUDY BENSON’S VARIEGATED ICONOGRAPHY
By Raphy SarkissianIf you don’t like the chaos, you’re a classicist. If you like it, you’re a romanticist.
— Agnes Martin*Here is a paradox, a whimsical aporia: Albeit abstract and self-reflexive, the luxuriously colored and highly intricate paintings of Trudy Benson are imbued with rich art-historical and present-day references. Within Benson’s methodically constructed pictorial fields, where geometric structures and painterly gestures cohabit, autonomy and allusion seem to be cut from the same cloth, to be inextricable sides of the same coin. To confront the compositionally innovative and chromatically lavish paintings of her recently realized series XSTATIC is to come face-to-face with a selfcontained formalist language that is nonetheless inseparable from the boundless archive of modernist abstraction and the visual grammars of its canonical masters. Benson’s reenactment of those traditions testifies to the potential expansiveness of abstraction. In 1948, Josef Albers straightforwardly summed up the concept of abstraction by claiming, “Art should not represent, but present.”1 Benson seems to be declaring, “Art can present, represent and re-present at the same time.” For Benson, the creative process relies upon experimentation through the medium of paint and mark-making as much as it entails investigations of the trajectories of abstraction within the context of our technocratic epoch.
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Agnes Martin, Night Sea, 1963, crayon, gold leaf and oil on linen; 72 x 72 in. (182.88 x 182.88 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Benson’s prolific practice embodies the classicism of the modernist grid with a playful edge. It revels in linearity and painterliness, as if to resurrect and regenerate the architectonic rationality of Piet Mondrian through the extravagant sensuality of Henri Matisse. Blue Planet (2023) comes forth as a tribute to Mondrian’s tile pa ern, now redefined through Matisse’s triadic color scheme of Music and Dance (both 1910), that eminent pair of paintings at the Hermitage Museum in which shades of green, red, and blue embody sheer sensorial opulence. Concurrently, within such paintings as In a Word and t zero (both 2023), the geometric scrupulousness of Agnes Martin’s Night Sea (1963) or Leaves (1966) appears to have become ingeniously integrated with the undulating forms and vegetal motif of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue and Green Music (1919-21) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Having interwoven the objectivism of Mondrian and the subjectivism of Matisse in Blue Planet, along with the asceticism of Martin and the sensuality of O’Keeffe, Benson’s painting invites the observer to address its meaning through multifarious historical perspectives and feminist points of view.
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The treatment of the grid in Blue Planet overlays the decorative with the sense of elemental corporeality and compositional fluidity we encounter within the painterly grid of Paul Klee’s May Picture (1925) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As the art historian Jenny Anger incisively contends in her book Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art, “Klee’s immense artistic output and career are in fact profoundly shaped by the vicissitudes of the decorative, including gender.”2 Benson’s current pictorial language can be read as an extension and expansion of Klee’s May Picture.
Such pioneers of abstraction as Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Hans Arp may also come to mind when we think of the first few decades of the twentieth century in relation to the evocative abstractions of Benson. While singular in their stylistic totality, the chromatically vibrant and meticulously realized works of Benson remain in powerful aesthetic dialogues with the above forerunners of modernism.
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Klee, Paul. May Picture. 1925. Oil on cardboard, H. 16-5/8, W. 19-1/2 inches (42.2 x 49.5 cm.).
The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1984 (1984.315.42).
Benson’s visual discourse remains in equally compelling conversations with such prominent artists of the second half of the twentieth century as Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held, along with such contemporary practitioners of painting as Frank Stella, Sean Scully, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, Jonathan Lasker, Dan Walsh, and José Lerma. The seemingly abstract iconography of Benson, with its straight and incidental references to the trajectory of modernist painting, redefines the very concept of abstraction. With its conventional medium, that iconography translates as implicit commentary upon our digitally conditioned and media-dominant cultural reality.
In Hello Goodbye (2023), three pairs of quadrilaterals in red, yellow, and blue appear to float atop a pictorial field of an irregular checkerboard pa ern in shades of dusty pink, coral orange, and fair blue. While the upper and lower slanted margins of the composition give way to an optical impression of shallow spatial recession, the viewer’s observation is redirected through the tactility of thin elevated lines. These are traces of oil paint applied directly from tubes upon the acrylic medium covering the canvas, engaging the spectator’s perception with the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast. They are palpable marks that come across as the artist’s final touch in the completion of the elaborate painting process. Tactility and opticality are in contest within the syntax of Benson. As if it were an allusion to Malevich’s Suprematism: Airplane Flying (1915) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Benson has reconfigured abstraction’s possibilities by rendering each one of the rectangular cells of the quasi-checkerboard in the background as a site for engrossed doodling that from a far distance illusively conveys the impression of a pixelated zone of digitized color. As if aimed to transgress the impersonality of our digital culture through the convention of painting, or perhaps transfixed by pixelation’s control of our lives, Benson circuitously invites the viewer to reflect upon the expectations of artmaking in our digital era.
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The five painterly quadrilaterals within the pictorial space of Two to Too (2023), which are underneath the thickly laid red and lavender oil lines and are suggestive of a midground region, recall Hans Arp’s Construction élémentaire (1916) collage on paper at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Contrarily, a given quadrilateral of the pastel checkerboard of the background is rendered through a systematic use of the airbrush technique to generate ghostlike shapes, where lines are rendered assiduously in undulating pa erns. The resulting irregular checkerboard in pale coral and charcoal shades can be seen as a surreal farmland viewed from overhead. In turn, the upper and lower angular margins of the painting’s composition simulate shallow spatiality within a wondrous pictorial field.
Vibrant through its intense pink and yellow organic squares, Radiant Sky (2023) is another evocative abstraction that conjures up an imaginary cropland captured from an aerial vantage point. Flash (2023), with an analogous composition, engulfs the viewer through its riveting pale e of oranges and greys, accentuated with painterly “windows” of expressive renditions in lavender pink and azure. While evoking Mondrian’s Composition C (192o) at the Museum of Modern Art and Hoffman’s Pompeii (1959) at the Tate as structural and chromatic points of departure within Benson’s creative process, the irregular checkerboard here uncannily conjures up the pixelated screens of our information age. Benson is undoubtably spellbound by digitalization, even though she doesn’t use it in her painting process.
Benson’s rectilinear grid takes on a topological transformation within Life Cycle of a Flowering Plant (2024). Here, curved axes frame pictorial units that embody abstractions of foliage. Ten overlapping tectonic planes, as if borrowed from Marcel Duchamp’s Tu m’ (1918) at the Yale University Art Gallery, epitomize the painting’s playfulness with modern art’s theoretical parameters of “flatness,” “depth,” and “temporality.” Within this reticulate configuration there is a sense of the simultaneity of the geometric and the organic, the controlled and the gestural, linearity and painterliness, surface and space, the historical and the present moment.
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Benson probes the intrinsic elements of the medium of painting through the framework of our technocratic times. Harry Thorne fi ingly notes in his essay wri en for Benson’s 2020 exhibition Join at Loyal Gallery in Stockholm: “But while Trudy Benson acknowledges this digital legacy, so too does she stage a small act of resistance against the cold, two-dimensionality of the screen. … How, then, to interact with Benson’s work? Are these gestures, in the truest sense, or painterly cyphers for those very gestures (or, indeed, both)? In his essay ‘Reassembling Painting’ (2015), David Joselit discusses the subject-object brushstroke: a dual act that is at once an expressive gesture and a component of a system.”3 Purple FTW (2024) incorporates both the circumspectly rendered and the cursorily executed. As Joselit observes, “something analogous happened in the phase of modern painting from 1960 to 2015 wherein passage and transitivity combine to form networks: the paradigmatic form of the information age. … network painting continues modern art’s task of redefining the relation between subjects and objects through new modalities of aesthetic work.”4
Affability and resistance have come to cohabit within the pictorial realm of Benson. Though Benson has retained Klee’s grid-like pa ern as a background in Tests Her Limits (2022), the seven monochromatic quadrilaterals here appear to have been subtracted and replaced by spraypainted scribbly loops nested within the cells of the contorted grid. Such graffiti motifs also fill select compartments within Bliss Plus and Back on Earth (both 2023), paintings that operate as iconic and symbolic signifiers of our tangible urban environments and virtual realities. These works of Benson, with their vibrant coloration and quirky facture, have redirected neoplasticism and action painting toward our digitally conditioned present-day reality. Through implicit references to the lexicons of contemporary practitioners of painting, the subtext of Benson’s paintings draws our a ention to the impact of technology upon culture.
When Agnes Martin was asked to explain the title of one of her paintings, Grey Goose Descending, the artist responded, “we have certain feelings when birds descend. And that’s what the painting is about. … descending feelings. They’re beyond words.”5 The feelings we sense when we encounter a painting from Benson’s XSTATIC series may be nature tessellated by architecture.
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Yet those feelings perhaps bring us closer to abstract painting’s own iconographic register, which has been accruing since the outset of the twentieth century and has taken on diverse routes in our postmodern times—what Jean Baudrillard has characterized as our “era of simulation.”6 Within the variegated iconography of Trudy Benson, the simultaneity of order and disarray, along with the coexistence of classicism and romanticism, gives way to a sense of elation as we ascertain the formalist distinctions of a given painting, distinctions that nonetheless mirror our irrevocably transformed media-saturated reality.
Notes:
* Agnes Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Barbara Haskell, exhibition catalogue (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), pp. 13-21, here p. 15.
1. Josef Albers, excerpt from an artist’s session held in New York, 1948; cited in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 536-44.
2. Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 5.
3. Harry Thorne, “Trudy Benson: Join,” catalogue essay of exhibition held at Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, March 26 through May 9, 2020, n.p.
4. David Joselit, “Reassembling Painting,” in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, eds. Manuela Ammer, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit (Munich: Prestel, 2016), pp. 169-81, here p. 173.
5. Agnes Martin, cited in Susan Campbell, “Interview with Agnes Martin,” May 15, 1989, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., p. 12. Cited in Anna C. Chave, “Agnes Martin: ‘Humility, the Beautiful Daughter . . . All of Her Ways Are Empty,’” in Agnes Martin, pp. 131-51, here p. 149.
6. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
Raphy Sarkissian’s latest monograph is Sean Scully: Material World, published by Hatje Cantz in 2022 for the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen. His essay “Substratum” appeared in Liliane Tomasko: We Sleep Where We Fall, published by Hatje Cantz in 2021. His most recent exhibition reviews have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail. He is currently affiliated with the School of Visual Arts and divides his time between New York and London.
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A Cross Across, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
34 x 40 inches
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86.4 x 101.6 cm
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Back on Earth, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
58 x 64 inches
147.3 x 162.6 cm
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Bliss Plus, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
60 x 80 inches
152.4 x 203.2 cm
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Blue Planet, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
60 x 80 inches
152.4 x 203.2 cm
20
Fidget, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
54 x 56 inches
137.2 x 142.2 cm
Flash, 2023
72 x 96 inches
22
Acrylic and oil on canvas
182.9 x 243.8 cm
24
Ghost Girl, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
64 x 58 inches
162.6 x 147.3 cm
26
Hello Goodbye, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
61 x 66 inches
154.9 x 167.6 cm
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In a Word, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
40 x 60 inches
101.6 x 152.4 cm
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Like a Song, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
66 x 70 inches
167.6 x 177.8 cm
32
Pink Trance, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
64 x 58 inches
162.6 x 147.3 cm
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Radiant Sky, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
60 x 80 inches
152.4 x 203.2 cm
t zero, 2023
36
Acrylic and oil on canvas
40 x 60 inches
101.6 x 152.4 cm
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There Isn’t Anything, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
61 x 66 inches
154.9 x 167.6 cm
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Tingle, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
32 x 37 inches
81.3 x 94 cm
To Too,
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Two
2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
34 x 40 inches
86.4 x 101.6 cm
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Why, 2023
Acrylic and oil on canvas
32 x 37 inches
81.3 x 94 cm
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ILOVEYOU, 2024
Acrylic and oil on canvas
52 x 60 inches
132.1 x 152.4 cm
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Life Cycle of a Flowering Plant, 2024
Acrylic and oil on canvas
40 x 60 inches
101.6 x 152.4 cm
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My Oozy Past, 2024
Acrylic and oil on canvas
72 x 80 inches
182.9 x 203.2 cm
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Purple FTW, 2024
Acrylic and oil on canvas
60 x 80 inches
152.4 x 203.2 cm
TRUDY BENSON
Born in Richmond, VA in 1985
Lives and works in Newburgh, NY
EDUCATION
2010
MFA, Pra Institute, New York, NY
2007
BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024
“Nothing Net,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Lyon, France
“XSTATIC,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
2023
“Plastic Paintings,” Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria
Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT
2021
“WAVES,” SUNNY NY, New York, NY
“Hard Color Heat Wave,” Massif Central, Brussels, Belgium
“WAVES,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“/ Z / Z /,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Étienne, France
2018
“Cuts, Paints,” Team (Bungalow), Los Angeles, CA
“Closer Than They Appear,” Lyles & King, New York, NY
“Infinite Spiral,” Dio Horia, Mykonos, Greece
2017
Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland
“Garden in Motion,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Paris, France
2016
“Cosmicomics,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg
“Spooky Action at a Distance,” Half Gallery, New York, NY
2015
“Shapes of Things,” Lisa Cooley, New York, NY
2013
“PAINT,” Horton Gallery, New York, NY
2011
“Actual/Virtual,” Mike Weiss Gallery, New York, NY
2010
“Space Jam,” Freight + Volume, New York, NY
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024
“Artists in Residence 2023,” Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria
2023
“(Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract,” Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY
“CURATED BY: NAZIF LOPULISSA,” m.simons, Amsterdam, Netherlands
“I AM THE PASSENGER,” Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY
2022
“Why I Make Art” (curated by Brian Alfred), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Sunrise/Sunset,” SUNNY NY, New York, NY
“zzzzzzzzzzzzz” (with Russell Tyler), Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY “4EVA” (with Russell Tyler), Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany
2021
“Light” (curated by Rico Gatson), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Phase 1,” The Hole, East Hampton, NY
“Path of the Storm,” SUNNY NY, New York, NY “Group Show,” RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland
2020
“Join,” LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
“Accrochage,” RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland
“True Lines,” Over the Influence, Los Angeles, CA “100!,” LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
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2019
“Decoy” (curated by Marc Mitchell), Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Arkansas, Faye eville, AR
“New Edition: Print from the Past, Present, and Future at Pra ” (curated by Grayson Cox and Caitlin Riordan), Pra Institute, New York, NY
“Rise,” RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland
“le ciel, l’eau, les dauphins, la vierge, les flics, le sang des nobles, l’ONU, l’Europe, les casques bleus, Facebook, Twi er,” Forde, Geneva, Switzerland
2018
“MOONDOG,” East Hampton Shed, East Hampton, NY
“10 Years in Luxembourg,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Windhof, Luxembourg
“Set Adri on Memory Bliss,” Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY
“Group Exhibition,” Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2017
“Come as You Are,” Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montréal, Canada
“Post Analog Painting II,” The Hole, New York, NY
“Pro-Forma: Context and Meaning in Abstraction” (curated by Vi orio Colaizzi), Work Release Gallery, Norfolk, VA
“Unobstructed Views,” Hawkins Ferry House, Grosse Pointe Shores, MI
“TT52” (with Yann Gerstberger), Lyles & King, New York, NY
2016
“Bodacioussss,” Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO
“Re-Planetizer” (curated by The Pit), Regina Rex, New York, NY
“Splotch,” Sperone Westwater, New York, NY
“The City & The City,” Denny Gallery, New York, NY
“Non Figuration - un regain d’Intérêt?,” Centre d’art contemporain, Meymac, France
“9999,” The Fireplace Project, East Hampton, NY
“Image Tech: Making Pictures in a Post-Digital Age” (curated by Mauro Zamora), The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ
2015
“PaintersNYC,” Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico; traveled to Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, Oaxaca, Mexico
“Feed the Meter,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Windhof, Luxembourg
“Let’s Go Away for Away for Awhile” (curated by Erik den Breejen and Maria Calandra), One Mile Gallery, Kingston, NY
“Swingers WKND” (curated by Tribble & Mancenido), New York, NY
“Anti-Fair,” Harper’s Books popup at the Carlyle Hotel, New York, NY
“Post-Analog Painting,” The Hole, New York, NY
“Trudy Benson and Russell Tyler,” Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, NY
“Trudy and Russell,” East Hampton Shed, East Hampton, NY
2014
“Go With the Flow,” The Hole, New York, NY
“Sunscreen,” James Graham & Sons, New York, NY
“Abstract American Today,” Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom
“OK Great Thanks This is So Ridiculous,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA; traveled to DCKT Contemporary, New York, NY
“This One’s Optimistic: Pincushion,” New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT
“Material Images,” Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, NY
“The Last Brucennial,” Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York, NY
2013
“Merge Visible,” Horton Gallery, New York, NY
“SPLAZITCH,” Side Effects Gallery, New York, NY
“Paint On, Paint Off,” Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY
“Windows,” Denny Gallery, New York, NY
“XSTRACTION,” The Hole, New York, NY
“Paradox Maintenance Technicians,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA
2012
“Aggro Crag,” BOSI Contemporary, New York, NY
“Where My Cones At?” (curated by Ryan Travis Christian), Double Break, San Diego, CA
“Pra Alumni Painters,” Pra Manha an Gallery, New York, NY
“Spindles” (curated by Adam G. Mignanelli), Kinfolk Studios, New York, NY
“WET WET” (curated by the BLAAAHg), New York, NY
“Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation New Acquisitions and Prints,” Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ
“Idealizing the Imaginary: Illusion and Invention in Contemporary Painting,” Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI
2010
“Behind the Green Door,” DNA Gallery, Provincetown, MA
“Pra MFA Exhibition,” Pra Manha an Gallery, New York, NY
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2009
“Fervor,” Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY
“Down Below It’s Chaos,” ArtJail, New York, NY
“A Piece,” LABA Artists’ Space at the 14th Street Y, New York, NY
2008
“Refinement,” Aswoon Gallery, New York, NY
“Studio 23 Presents LOL the CommandP BFF 4EVA Portfolio,” Transmission Gallery, Richmond, VA
“Transmission Introduces Studio 23,” Transmission Gallery, Richmond, VA
2007
“24/7 Fire in the Hole,” Plant Zero Art Center, Richmond, VA
AWARDS + RESIDENCIES
2023
Artist in Residence, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria
2014
Nominee, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, New York, NY
2012
Painting Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY
SELECT COLLECTIONS
Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon
Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, New York, NY
Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA
Susan and Michael Hort Collection, New York, NY
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Published on the occasion of the exhibition
TRUDY BENSON
XSTATIC
28 March – 11 May 2024
Miles McEnery Gallery
515 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
tel +1 212 445 0051
www.milesmcenery.com
Publication © 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery
All rights reserved
Essay © 2024 Raphy Sarkissian
Photo credit:
p. 6: © Agnes Martin Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
photograph: Katherine Du Tiel
p. 7: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY & © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Publications and Archival Associate
Julia Schlank, New York, NY
Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY
Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY
Catalogue layout by Spevack Loeb, New York NY
ISBN: 979-8-3507-2876-7
Cover: Flash, (detail), 2023
