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    Kim Benson: Unearthed

    June 7-July 20, 2024

    Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 5–7pm

    Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Kim Benson’s “Unearthed,” the Minneapolis-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and first solo presentation on the West Coast, from June 7 to July 20, 2024. The exhibition features 11 new oil paintings made over the past year that push Benson’s work to new scales. Mining the history of art through an excavation and reinterpretation of Renaissance paintings, Unearthed expands and abstracts the genres of landscape, still life, and portraiture.

    Within the exhibition, representational figures and objects are transfigured into abstraction. Using lace, fabric, metallic paint, stencils, and tape, Benson meticulously layers rich, impasto surfaces such that imagery emerges and dissolves. Lace is both ground and subject, a veil and mode for reveal through which Benson materially and conceptually erodes the facade of history.

    In one of the largest works in the exhibition, Forever and One Day (2024), flowing drapery and an outstretched hand cross into a grid-like tessellation, revealing a glitching, unstable narrative across time. Drawing from imagery of El Greco’s vanitas still-life Penitent Magdalene, Benson crops and enlarges areas of softness and sensuality in radiating hues of red and orange. In doing so, the artist places Mary Magdalene’s femininity in tension with the architecture of the painting’s structured surface.
    In Matrix Hold (2024), a pattern of recurring blue, yellow, and red triangles unfolds across the canvas, obscuring fleshy fingers painted from a portrait of the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Maria van Oosterwijck. Benson’s use of geometric pixilation pushes figurative representation into architectural and quasi-digital realms. Hands as a subject matter refer to her own process of making and ideas of creation, care, and communication.
    Bringing together her signature techniques – lace overlay, geometric abstraction, and masking – Forecaster (criss-cross) (2024) expands Benson’s visual language into a kind of cosmic collage. At its most representational, a hand holds a paintbrush while elsewhere, opaque black swathes define the composition’s contours. Circular geometries act like lenses, articulating various modes of abstraction.
    Benson’s densely and additively built paintings are maximalist compositions. Through emergence and the suggestion of decay, works in the exhibition challenge seemingly static images. Benson’s layered interventions imbue art historical imagery with new meaning and metaphorical potential.

    Kim Benson (b. 1986, Denver, CO) received her MFA from University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her BFA from the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN. Benson’s work is in numerous public and private collections; including Walker Art Center, Plains Art Museum, and North Dakota Museum of Art. In addition to her most recent solo exhibition at TOA Presents (Minneapolis, MN), Benson’s work has been included in group exhibitions at MANA Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ), Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend), Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), Rochester Art Center (Minnesota) and NADA Chicago Invitational. She has enjoyed residences at La Macina di San Cresci, Adams State University, McCanna House with the North Dakota Museum of Art, Jentel Foundation, and the Soap Factory. Benson lives and works in Minneapolis, where she is an adjunct professor of art at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.