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Benicia Gantner @ Walker Contemporary

Friday, November 5, 2010 · No Comments

I love Benicia Gantner and find it fascinating how her work has changed over time. Just a few years ago her work was uber-graphic, kaleidoscopic and abstracted like the painting below from 2006. She’s clearly developed a maturity in her work and a more subtle way to convey her ideas of nature and the material world. I love the return to more natural, organic forms.

Gantner’s show at Art Hound favorite Walker Contemporary opens tonight. Here’s what the artist had to say about her new body of work.

The reductive landscapes that define my work are rooted in my experience of the natural world, yet manifest as images that are wholly unnatural- flattened, simplified spaces, saturated with color, and populated with both abstract and recognizable organic forms… These imagined spaces are like flashes of a dream, or déjà vu—both familiar and alien…

By using industrial “man-made” materials like acrylic and vinyl, I reinforce the idea that our experience of the natural world is infused with artifice and largely synthesized. I splice and graft organic forms together, creating new hybrid forms…

The work is bittersweet. I present imagined spaces burgeoning with life, often within a seemingly vacant, desolate quietude. I affirm the possibility of regeneration of the natural world, as I invent forms that explore the genius of survival and adaptation…

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