Kristin Baker

Last updated
Kristin Baker
Born1975
Stamford, Connecticut
NationalityAmerican
Known for Painting

Kristin Baker (born 1975, in Stamford, Connecticut) is a painter based in New York. She often uses stencil and sign painting techniques on PVC panels.

Contents

Baker holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University, Boston (1998), and graduated from Yale’s MA Painting programme (2002).

Her work has been exhibited in many prominent international galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Royal Academy in London and The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Her work is featured in the Saatchi Collection, and she is represented by Deitch Projects, New York.

Selected solo exhibitions

2003 Flat Out and 2005 Fall Out

Baker’s solo debut in New York, Flat Out, was presented by Deitch Projects in September 2003 and her subsequent Los Angeles debut, Fall Out, was presented by Acme in March 2005. Both exhibitions continued the artist’s interest in auto racing by exploring, “the connection between painting and automobile racing, particularly by the contrast between accident versus control that characterizes both pursuits.” [1]

In Debra Singer's article for Artforum the work is explained within a cultural context. “ Baker explains that she started to understand racing as a microcosm of American capitalism, given the sport’s inherent ties to technological innovation and corporate sponsorship.” But however specific the subject of auto racing may be, the work still maneuvers itself in the broader sense of painting. Singer explains, “Despite such culturally specific associations, many paintings transform representational details into predominantly formal elements, as in Ride to Live, Live to Ride, 2004. The up-close vantage of a moment immediately following an explosive crash, when smoke clouds the view of drivers and spectators alike, is dominated by vibrant, propulsive shards that radiate outward, interlacing with billowing flows of sooty haze. . The flurry of edges and forms, reminiscent of the ornamental impulse of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, imbues the scene of destruction with a paradoxical, almost floral delicacy, as translucent and opaque layers of paint overlap like scraps of torn tissue, beautiful despite circumstance.” [2]

Bakers paintings during this period are somewhere between the representational world and the abstract one. New York based writer Rebecca Spence spoke with Baker about this line in her article called Boundary Issues:

"In Baker’s wall-size Portrait of a Whatever Agricultural Excursion (2005), what at first appears to be an abstract pastiche of fluid shapes is, upon closer examination, an overturned race car. As her work has evolved over the past several years, Baker says she is less conscious of ‘riding the boundary’ between the historically disparate modes. 'I used to see them as two different things that I would bring together, but now I feel like they've dissolved into one another.'" [3]

Flat Out also featured freestanding sculptural works such as Kurotoplac Kurve that the artist would explore further in subsequent shows.

2007 Surge and Shadow

For her second solo at Deitch Projects, Baker started moving away from the subject of auto racing, but not from the movement and speed it allowed in prior work. Ethan Greenbaum notes:

“The large-scale installation features a series of painting hybrids as well as wall mounted, rectilinear works. Baker has jettisoned her racecar motif in favor of an expression of speed itself…Walking through the show, I thought of the Italian Futurists, all bluster and dark optimism about the mechanistic promise of the new century.” [4]

Not only are the Futurists brought to mind, the work also bears references to Marcel Duchamp and Théodore Géricault. “A riff on Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” imagines it unpeopled and overcome by tattered waves; in a twist on Ab Ex gesture, frenzied brushstrokes are isolated, cleaned up, and tidily placed in the picture plane.” [5]

The spectator is now turned from the movement and speed of the racetrack to the uncertainty of a raft in the stormy sea. Jennifer Gross writes, “Baker’s reconstitution of the raft is comparable to the animation of her race cars: both are blown apart and we are engaged with a heightened sense of an accumulation of moments in time. Although her mark-making is very controlled, calculated even, the spectator and the raft are immersed in a wave of painting, drowning in painting as a material fact. Like Géricault, Baker is using the conviction and excitement that only a contemporary incident, in her case the “mechanical” process of painting itself, to stimulate the work...What we see here is the rough anachronistic interface, the crash, between two traditions of high art: history painting, seen here as a dissipated raft and sublime landscape, and abstract painting embodied in crashing waves of color. [6]

The other major work from Surge and Shadow is a sculptural piece entitled Flying Curve, Differential Manifold. Picking up from similar past works (Kurotoplac Kurve), Flying Curve, Differential Manifold is on a new scale. Again, Jennifer Gross explains that, “ Flying Curve is in part inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s last painting, Tu m’” and was “Duchamp’s farewell to painting.” However Baker’s aim is not an end to painting, but rather she seems inspired and challenged by the notion. “Baker has followed through on Duchamp’s conceptual curve ball to painting, speeding up and dispersing its forms at ten times its original scale, enveloping the viewer in sublime kaleidoscope of color and form. Baker’s work reveals her belief that painting still has somewhere to take us and that Duchamp’s theoretical endgame, embodied in Tu m’, took her down a path to painting despite Duchamp's protestations.” [7]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcel Duchamp</span> French painter, sculptor, and chess player (1887–1968)

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Found object</span> Non-standard material used in work of art

A found object, or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Pablo Picasso first publicly utilized the idea when he pasted a printed image of chair caning onto his painting titled Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Marcel Duchamp is thought to have perfected the concept several years later when he made a series of ready-mades, consisting of completely unaltered everyday objects selected by Duchamp and designated as art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a standard urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed on a pedestal, resting on its side. In its strictest sense the term "ready-made" is applied exclusively to works produced by Marcel Duchamp, who borrowed the term from the clothing industry while living in New York, and especially to works dating from 1913 to 1921.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suzanne Duchamp</span> French painter

Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti was a French Dadaist painter, collagist, sculptor, and draughtsman. Her work was significant to the development of Paris Dada and modernism and her drawings and collages explore fascinating gender dynamics. Due to the fact that she was a woman in the male prominent Dada movement, she was rarely considered an artist in her own right. She constantly lived in the shadows of her famous older brothers, who were also artists, or she was referred to as "the wife of." Her work in painting turns out to be significantly influential to the landscape of Dada in Paris and to the interests of women in Dada. She took a large role as an avant-garde artist, working through a career that spanned five decades, during a turbulent time of great societal change. She used her work to express certain subject matter such as personal concerns about modern society, her role as a modern woman artist, and the effects of the First World War. Her work often weaves painting, collage, and language together in complex ways.

Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to American artist Sol LeWitt's definition of conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

French frigate <i>Méduse</i> (1810) French Navy vessel wrecked off the coast of Africa in 1816

Méduse was a 40-gun Pallas-class frigate of the French Navy, launched in 1810. She took part in the Napoleonic Wars during the late stages of the Mauritius campaign of 1809–1811 and in raids in the Caribbean.

<i>The Raft of the Medusa</i> Painting by Théodore Géricault

The Raft of the Medusa – originally titled Scène de Naufrage – is an oil painting of 1818–19 by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). Completed when the artist was 27, the work has become an icon of French Romanticism. At 491 by 716 cm, it is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of today's Mauritania on 2 July 1816. On 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre-Paul Prud'hon</span> French painter

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon was a French Romantic painter and draughtsman best known for his allegorical paintings and portraits such as Madame Georges Anthony and Her Two Sons (1796). He painted a portrait of each of Napoleon's two wives.

<i>Fountain</i> (Duchamp) 1917 sculpture by Marcel Duchamp

Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, the inaugural exhibition by the Society to be staged at the Grand Central Palace in New York. When explaining the purpose of his readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice." In Duchamp's presentation, the urinal's orientation was altered from its usual positioning. Fountain was not rejected by the committee, since Society rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee, but the work was never placed in the show area. Following that removal, Fountain was photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in the Dada journal The Blind Man. The original has been lost.

Sean Landers is an American artist. He is best known for using his personal experience as public subject matter and for utilizing diverse styles and media in a performative manner, and is especially known for his word art. His work encompasses many media: painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, writing, video and audio, and he uses humor and confession, gravity and pathos in it, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, sincerity and insincerity.

Art intervention is an interaction with a previously existing artwork, audience, venue/space or situation. It is in the category of conceptual art and is commonly a form of performance art. It is associated with Letterist International, Situationist International, Viennese Actionists, the Dada movement and Neo-Dadaists. More latterly, intervention art has delivered Guerrilla art, street art plus the Stuckists have made extensive use of it to affect perceptions of artworks they oppose and as a protest against existing interventions.

Artstar is an unscripted reality television series set in the New York City art world, considered to be the first in the visual arts. Selected from an open call of over 400 applicants, eight artists participate in a group exhibition at Deitch Projects with the opportunity for a solo exhibition as well. The program documents the selected artists as they interact with leading critics, curators, collectors, and artists in New York, while making new works as part of the collaborative exhibition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Swoon (artist)</span> American graffiti artist

Caledonia Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is an American contemporary artist who works with printmaking, sculpture, and stop-motion animation to create immersive installations, community-based projects and public artworks. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition. Her work centers the transformative capacity of art as a catalyst for healing within communities experiencing crisis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Classificatory disputes about art</span> Disputes about what should and should not be classified as art

Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today.

<i>L.H.O.O.Q.</i> Readymade by Marcel Duchamp

L.H.O.O.Q. is a work of art by Marcel Duchamp. First conceived in 1919, the work is one of what Duchamp referred to as readymades, or more specifically a rectified ready-made. The readymade involves taking mundane, often utilitarian objects not generally considered to be art and transforming them, by adding to them, changing them, or simply renaming and reorienting them and placing them in an appropriate setting. In L.H.O.O.Q. the found object is a cheap postcard reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century painting Mona Lisa onto which Duchamp drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Bidlo</span> American conceptual artist

Michael Bidlo is an American conceptual artist who employs painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, and other forms of "social sculpture."

Mimi Gross is a New York City born American artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Deitch</span> American art dealer and curator (born 1952)

Jeffrey Deitch is an American art dealer and curator. He is best known for his gallery Deitch Projects (1996–2010) and curating groundbreaking exhibitions such as Lives (1975) and Post Human (1992), the latter of which has been credited with introducing the concept of "posthumanism" to popular culture. In 2010, ArtReview named him as the twelfth most influential person in the international art world.

Lea Lublin was an Argentine-French performance artist.

<i>Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating</i> Fictitious work by Marcel Duchamp

Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating is a fictitious work of art by Marcel Duchamp.

<i>Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette</i> Artwork by Marcel Duchamp, with the assistance of Man Ray

Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette is a work of art by Marcel Duchamp, with the assistance of Man Ray. First conceived in 1920, created spring of 1921, Belle Haleine is one of the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp, or more specifically a rectified ready-made.

References

  1. ↑ Debra. "First Take: Debra Singer on Kristin Baker" Artforum January 2005: 143
  2. ↑ Singer, Debra. "First Take: Debra Singer on Kristin Baker" Artforum January 2005: 143
  3. ↑ Spence, Rebecca. "Boundary Issues" Artnews April 2006: 124
  4. ↑ Ethan. "Kristin Baker at Deitch Projects" TheHighlights.org, 26 June 2007
  5. ↑ "Kristin Baker" The New Yorker April 2007: 26
  6. ↑ Gross, Jennifer. "Readymade Romantic" Surge and Shadow. New York: Deitch Projects, 2007.pg 12. Print
  7. ↑ Gross, Jennifer. "Readymade Romantic" Surge and Shadow. New York: Deitch Projects, 2007. pg 13. Print
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.