Benjamin Senior | Studio Voltaire | 12 October – 14 December 2013
For his first solo exhibition in a London public gallery, Benjamin Senior will present a new body of paintings. Senior's figurative paintings typically depict women engaged in sport or exercise. Recent works have featured a formal play of rhythms, false symmetries and colour relationships. This sense of play continues within the frame of the picture as athletic figures and the patterned interiors or landscapes they occupy fuse into one with the flat surface of the painting. There is a voyeuristic aspect to Senior's work as viewers become self-consciously aware of the action of their own gaze, as Dan Coombs recently noted:
"The impeccable clarity and compositional order of Senior's work invites us into what at first seems an uncomplicated and highly pleasurable relationship with his paintings. We are able to gaze upon lovingly rendered female bodies that are unaware of our presence and engaged in absorbing activities, but as we look further we encounter schisms within the compositions which disrupt the easy flow of our vision. In disrupting our vision, the subtle schisms suddenly make us aware of our own act of looking - we become self conscious - and suddenly we find that the painting seems to be gazing back at us." (Dan Coombs 2013)
Benjamin Senior (UK, 1982) is based in London and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010. He has had solo exhibitions at James Fuentes LLC, NewYork (2013), BolteLang, Zurich (2012 and Jerwood Project Space, London (2006).