Juxtapoz Magazine – Cristina BanBan: Mujeres @ Skarstedt, NYC
Skarstedt is delighted to announce our impending exhibition, Cristina BanBan: Mujeres. Featuring a suite of new function, the exhibition marks BanBan’s initial exhibit with the gallery because the announcement of her representation with Skarstedt in April 2022.
Each individual of the paintings on check out are titled either Mujer or Mujeres, Spanish for girl or females. This term gets to the heart of BanBan’s exercise, which stays reliable in its subject matter even as she continues to experienced and evolve as a painter. Women—their bodies and contradictory emotions—are BanBan’s core subject matter. By their kinds, she is equipped to filter her daily encounters and huge array of influences onto the canvas. The result is a series of performs that are at after private and common.
The several females in BanBan’s universe do not meet the viewer’s gaze, nor do they automatically interact with these about them. When this might speak to the pervasive feeling of isolation in our present-day culture, it also underscores the authority and assurance of these figures. BanBan’s ladies transcend voyeurism as they stand or lounge resolute in their ability, belying hundreds of years of preconceived strategies about nude women of all ages in portray. Their nakedness feels intentional, organic, modern—they are hot but not sexualized, and they exist on their personal conditions. The massive scale of both equally the canvases themselves and the ladies that inhabit their fields of shade are intentional, permitting the figures to envelop the viewer although commanding attention, respect, and admiration. Also, the significant hands and eyes so attribute of BanBan’s oeuvre evince a stately however intimate presence. Stylistically, these females have transitioned into classical, just about sculptural varieties configured in Renaissance-esque arrangements, revealing BanBan’s deep affinity for art historical past.
As BanBan’s follow carries on to evolve, line and colour have taken on new roles. Charcoal and oil adhere have been launched into her compositions, a byproduct of her recent transition to oil paint. The presence of these supplies lends a graphic high quality to the paintings, providing viewers a glimpse into her system and including a perception of immediacy. At the very same time, her palette has turned in direction of massive, gestural strokes of earthy tones—sky blues and loaded browns, mossy greens and burnt reds. Though these hues ground the figures in an perception of actuality, they are structured in these a way that these ladies surface to hover in a minute devoid of discernable time and area. As this sort of, the narratives of these paintings develop into increasingly open. These maturations in her exercise evoke the operate of Willem de Kooning, whose delicate equilibrium of abstraction and figuration, coupled with a innovative depiction of the female type, has propelled BanBan towards a newfound liberation of subject matter, transcending narrative construction by way of a focus on the pure painterly attributes of line, coloration, and type. It is this quest to uncover how to be concurrently abstract and referential that defines this new chapter of BanBan’s oeuvre.
During the will work on check out in Mujeres, BanBan incorporates her individual visage into her paintings along with that of her pals and other individuals from her day by day daily life as a signifies of reflecting on her individual particular activities. In this way, her paintings functionality as a thing of a diary, and the existing exhibition as a glimpse into BanBan’s internal planet.
Remain tuned for a function on BanBan’s new function in our Winter 2023 Quarterly, out late November 2022.
