Monica De Cardenas

Benjamin Senior (Project Room)
25 September – 16 November

Opening Wednesday 25 September 2013 6.30 pm

We are pleased to announce the first exhibition by British painter Benjamin Senior in Italy.

Senior’s figurative egg tempera paintings are constructed with a formal play of rhythms, geometry, false symmetries and colour interactions. The artist uses the subject of leisurely exercise as a springboard for these formal journeys. The regimented nature of the swimming club, the yoga class or the morning run offer a plausible context in which the figure can be repeated and geometricized. Senior’s work references the abstracted body in the European art and design of the 1920’s and 1930’s seen in the paintings of Fernand Leger and Balthus and the choreography of Busby Berkeley. This period of art history enacts a narrative of the object overthrowing the subject and geometric forces displacing the social. Applying this historicized lens to the contemporary culture of health and exercise, Senior touches upon binaries of the natural and the unnatural, the collective and the individual, the healthy and the unhealthy.

Benjamin Senior was born in 1982 and he lives in London. He received his BA at Wimbledon School of Art in 2004, and his MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2010. He held solos exhibitions at Bolte Lang, Zurich in 2012 and at James Fuentes in New York in 2013. In May Bolte Lang presented a solo exhibition of his work in the Discoveries section at Art Basel Hong Kong. In October 2013 he will present a solo show at Studio Voltaire in London. Residencies and awards include; Kingsgate Workshops Trust Residency 2011 – 2012 and the Gordon Luton Prize for Painting, 2010.