Skarstedt is delighted to announce our impending exhibition, Cristina BanBan: Mujeres. Featuring a suite of new function, the exhibition marks BanBan’s very first show with the gallery considering that the announcement of her illustration with Skarstedt in April 2022.
Every of the paintings on check out are titled either Mujer or Mujeres, Spanish for woman or girls. This phrase will get to the coronary heart of BanBan’s apply, which continues to be constant in its issue subject even as she proceeds to experienced and evolve as a painter. Women—their bodies and contradictory emotions—are BanBan’s core subject. As a result of their sorts, she is equipped to filter her every day ordeals and extensive array of influences on to the canvas. The final result is a series of functions that are at the moment private and common.
The various females in BanBan’s universe do not meet up with the viewer’s gaze, nor do they necessarily interact with these around them. Whilst this could talk to the pervasive feeling of isolation in our modern culture, it also underscores the authority and self-assurance of these characters. BanBan’s females transcend voyeurism as they stand or lounge resolute in their electrical power, belying hundreds of years of preconceived tips about nude women of all ages in portray. Their nakedness feels intentional, purely natural, modern—they are attractive but not sexualized, and they exist on their individual phrases. The significant scale of equally the canvases themselves and the girls that inhabit their fields of colour are intentional, enabling the figures to envelop the viewer when commanding consideration, regard, and admiration. Likewise, the massive arms and eyes so attribute of BanBan’s oeuvre evince a stately however intimate presence. Stylistically, these women have transitioned into classical, almost sculptural kinds configured in Renaissance-esque preparations, revealing BanBan’s deep affinity for art historical past.
As BanBan’s practice carries on to evolve, line and coloration have taken on new roles. Charcoal and oil adhere have been launched into her compositions, a byproduct of her new transition to oil paint. The presence of these products lends a graphic top quality to the paintings, offering viewers a glimpse into her system and adding a perception of immediacy. At the identical time, her palette has turned in direction of large, gestural strokes of earthy tones—sky blues and prosperous browns, mossy greens and burnt reds. Whilst these hues floor the figures in an perception of fact, they are structured in these a way that these ladies look to hover in a moment devoid of discernable time and location. As these kinds of, the narratives of these paintings come to be increasingly open. These maturations in her practice evoke the operate of Willem de Kooning, whose fragile stability of abstraction and figuration, coupled with a innovative depiction of the female form, has propelled BanBan towards a newfound liberation of subject matter make any difference, transcending narrative construction by a concentrate on the pure painterly qualities of line, colour, and variety. It is this quest to uncover how to be simultaneously summary and referential that defines this new chapter of BanBan’s oeuvre.
All through the operates on perspective in Mujeres, BanBan incorporates her own visage into her paintings together with that of her pals and other people today from her everyday lifetime as a indicates of reflecting on her have private activities. In this way, her paintings operate as anything of a diary, and the existing exhibition as a glimpse into BanBan’s interior world.
Stay tuned for a attribute on BanBan’s new do the job in our Winter 2023 Quarterly, out late November 2022.