November 05, 2009 — December 19, 2009 18 Wooster Street, New York
Splitting Twilight, an exhibition of new paintings by Kristin Baker, opens at Deitch Projects on November 5, 2009. Baker continues to push the contradictions inherent in the genre of painting while simultaneously celebrating its history. The new body of work playfully remixes the legacy of landscape painting within a modernist structure.
Kristin Baker is bending painting’s seeming limitations. By emphasizing the materiality of paint through her built up layers of troweled acrylic, Baker’s paintings approach other two-dimensional practices such as printmaking, photography and paper assemblage. While upholding the power and dynamism of painting, Baker seeks to create a third dimension in between many genres and hindered by none. Her compositions combine illusionistic and pictorial space as well as blatantly artificial forms and surfaces. Each mark and shape is created not by a brush but by an outline of torn tape. The final silhouette is filled in with paint, and when the tape is ripped away, a free-floating “gesture” or “mark” is added to the piece. These shapes are layered together to make forms and landscapes or scraped away to reveal the colors underneath. Layers of these joints create tufts, grooves and corrugated surfaces that approximate collage or even the planar aggregation of 3D digital imaging techniques. Using scraping tools Baker rubs, abrades and smoothes until the surface is like an x-ray of the past.
