TRUDY BENSON: WAVES

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Trudy Benson. WAVES, the artist’s inaugural solo exhibition at the gallery will open on 21 October at 511 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 27 November 2021. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Charlotte Jansen.

"In Benson’s punchy-colored paintings, the viewer is bounced vertiginously around, like the Olympic skateboarder Nyjah Huston flying down rails and curbs. Your sense of gravity, of where your feet touch the ground, is shaken as you stand. The paintings, fizzing with energy, popping with colors (each painting is loosely based on an analogous palette, often interrupted by an unexpected flash, a wobbly line in canary yellow here, a succulent orange stripe there), always land us back inside the work, as if we are in a visual pinball machine. We want to stay inside the work, to explore it. And no matter where we land, something new appears."

- Charlotte Jansen, "At the Limits of Possibility"

"In psychedelic, hypnotic works like "Peach Ultimate," some forms and patterns (inspired partly by vintage Emilio Pucci dresses) sink back while others seem to lurch forward into space. The effect is achieved, Benson says, by switching airbrushes, which allows her to hone the layers in new ways. Benson does offer breathers from this intensity, in the form of two black “windows”—black holes into an infinity, or what the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti might have called the “inexpressible nothing,” the gap between what exists and what is cultivated, between ourselves and others. Pulling the eye up and down, throwing us off center, the painting forces us to grapple with space and with our place in it."

- Charlotte Jansen, "At the Limits of Possibility"

"A scumbling effect, drips, brushstrokes, and marks left by the many other things Benson likes to apply paint with—traditional painting tools as well as unconventional items she picks up at dollar stores that have become pivotal to her practice. There are traces of an airbrush, a roller, a palette knife. These details speak to Benson’s own playfulness and lack of pretention—fun was had here, and you can feel it. "It’s my solace," Benson says."

 - Charlotte Jansen, "At the Limits of Possibility"