Skarstedt is delighted to announce our forthcoming exhibition, Cristina BanBan: Mujeres. Featuring a suite of new do the job, the exhibition marks BanBan’s 1st clearly show with the gallery considering that the announcement of her representation with Skarstedt in April 2022.
Just about every of the paintings on look at are titled either Mujer or Mujeres, Spanish for woman or females. This word will get to the heart of BanBan’s apply, which continues to be reliable in its issue issue even as she carries on to experienced and evolve as a painter. Women—their bodies and contradictory emotions—are BanBan’s main topic. As a result of their forms, she is capable to filter her daily activities and extensive array of influences onto the canvas. The consequence is a series of will work that are at as soon as personalized and common.
The a variety of women in BanBan’s universe do not satisfy the viewer’s gaze, nor do they automatically interact with individuals all over them. Although this may speak to the pervasive feeling of isolation in our modern society, it also underscores the authority and confidence of these characters. BanBan’s women of all ages transcend voyeurism as they stand or lounge resolute in their electric power, belying hundreds of years of preconceived concepts about nude females in painting. Their nakedness feels intentional, pure, modern—they are alluring but not sexualized, and they exist on their possess conditions. The huge scale of each the canvases on their own and the girls that inhabit their fields of shade are intentional, letting the figures to envelop the viewer though commanding awareness, respect, and admiration. Also, the big fingers and eyes so characteristic of BanBan’s oeuvre evince a stately nevertheless personal existence. Stylistically, these females have transitioned into classical, just about sculptural types configured in Renaissance-esque arrangements, revealing BanBan’s deep affinity for artwork historical past.
As BanBan’s observe continues to evolve, line and colour have taken on new roles. Charcoal and oil adhere have been launched into her compositions, a byproduct of her current transition to oil paint. The existence of these products lends a graphic excellent to the paintings, providing viewers a glimpse into her procedure and adding a feeling of immediacy. At the similar time, her palette has turned to significant, gestural strokes of earthy tones—sky blues and wealthy browns, mossy greens and burnt reds. Though these hues floor the figures in an effect of actuality, they are structured in these kinds of a way that these ladies appear to hover in a instant devoid of discernable time and position. As such, the narratives of these paintings come to be increasingly open. These maturations in her exercise evoke the work of Willem de Kooning, whose sensitive stability of abstraction and figuration, coupled with a revolutionary depiction of the feminine form, has propelled BanBan towards a newfound liberation of issue issue, transcending narrative construction via a concentrate on the pure painterly traits of line, coloration, and kind. It is this quest to uncover how to be at the same time abstract and referential that defines this new chapter of BanBan’s oeuvre.
All over the performs on look at in Mujeres, BanBan incorporates her possess visage into her paintings alongside that of her mates and other folks from her day by day daily life as a suggests of reflecting on her own own activities. In this way, her paintings perform as some thing of a diary, and the current exhibition as a glimpse into BanBan’s internal world.
Continue to be tuned for a function on BanBan’s new get the job done in our Winter season 2023 Quarterly, out late November 2022.
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