Skarstedt is delighted to announce our approaching exhibition, Cristina BanBan: Mujeres. Featuring a suite of new get the job done, the exhibition marks BanBan’s first demonstrate with the gallery since the announcement of her illustration with Skarstedt in April 2022.
Each of the paintings on check out are titled either Mujer or Mujeres, Spanish for female or ladies. This phrase gets to the coronary heart of BanBan’s follow, which remains constant in its issue issue even as she proceeds to experienced and evolve as a painter. Women—their bodies and contradictory emotions—are BanBan’s main subject matter. By way of their types, she is capable to filter her everyday activities and vast array of influences onto the canvas. The final result is a series of operates that are at as soon as own and common.
The different women in BanBan’s universe do not meet the viewer’s gaze, nor do they necessarily engage with those around them. Although this may perhaps discuss to the pervasive feeling of isolation in our modern culture, it also underscores the authority and assurance of these people. BanBan’s women transcend voyeurism as they stand or lounge resolute in their energy, belying centuries of preconceived strategies about nude gals in painting. Their nakedness feels intentional, organic, modern—they are hot but not sexualized, and they exist on their personal phrases. The big scale of both of those the canvases by themselves and the women that inhabit their fields of coloration are intentional, permitting the figures to envelop the viewer while commanding interest, regard, and admiration. Furthermore, the big arms and eyes so characteristic of BanBan’s oeuvre evince a stately nonetheless personal existence. Stylistically, these girls have transitioned into classical, almost sculptural varieties configured in Renaissance-esque arrangements, revealing BanBan’s deep affinity for art heritage.
As BanBan’s exercise carries on to evolve, line and color have taken on new roles. Charcoal and oil adhere have been introduced into her compositions, a byproduct of her recent changeover to oil paint. The existence of these elements lends a graphic top quality to the paintings, offering viewers a glimpse into her procedure and introducing a feeling of immediacy. At the identical time, her palette has turned in the direction of big, gestural strokes of earthy tones—sky blues and prosperous browns, mossy greens and burnt reds. Although these hues ground the figures in an perception of actuality, they are structured in this sort of a way that these women of all ages appear to hover in a instant devoid of discernable time and area. As these, the narratives of these paintings become increasingly open. These maturations in her exercise evoke the get the job done of Willem de Kooning, whose fragile stability of abstraction and figuration, coupled with a revolutionary depiction of the woman sort, has propelled BanBan towards a newfound liberation of topic subject, transcending narrative construction as a result of a concentrate on the pure painterly features of line, color, and type. 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.
Throughout the operates on watch in Mujeres, BanBan incorporates her individual visage into her paintings together with that of her mates and other persons from her everyday lifetime as a means of reflecting on her personal private encounters. In this way, her paintings purpose as a little something of a diary, and the current exhibition as a glimpse into BanBan’s inner world.
Keep tuned for a aspect on BanBan’s new perform in our Winter 2023 Quarterly, out late November 2022.
