Breathless, Benjamin Senior

About

12th May 2011 — 28th May 2011 Private View: Wednesday 11th of May Gallery open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday 12.00 to 18.00 Event: Children's egg tempera Workshop on 14th May (for more information please contact the gallery) Studio 106 Art Gallery is delighted to invite you to Breathless, a solo exhibition by artist Benjamin Senior. Central to Senior's practice is a formal play of rhythms, false symmetries and colour relationships. These elements are combined in this new body of work in which he uses physical exercise as a springboard for exploring the implications of the body fixed within a flattened space. Representing geometrised figures in the context of sport and exercise allows the artist to indulge both in abstract pattern and the rendering of the human body. In Senior's work, the body becomes a formal matter, reduced to a rhythmic play between convexity and flatness against a patterned background. The small scale of the work creates an intimate space in which to contemplate the dynamics of the picture plane. References for his imagery can be found in the figurative stylization of the 1920's and 1930's. By turning this historicized lens on the contemporary culture of bodily wellbeing and regimented exercise, Senior touches upon binaries of the natural and the unnatural, the collective and the individual, the healthy and the unhealthy. Viewers of Senior's work can 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. With a 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, Senior strives to directly capture certain effects of nature — a particular quality of light, the warmth beneath the skin. Benjamin Senior lives and works in London. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010 and currently he is a resident artist at the Kingsgate Workshops Trust in London. Recent exhibitions in London-UK include The Fort Painting Show at Fort (2011), The Future Can Wait at Shoreditch Town Hall (2010), Polemically Small at Charlie Smith (2010), and the 2010 Studio Voltaire Members Exhibition, selected by Jennifer Higgie and Rebecca Warren. www.benjaminsenior.com