Overview

'Breathless' is the first monograph on the emerging British painter Benjamin Senior. His paintings conjure up a world that is delightful, curious, quirky, and distinctly his own. It is a world in which bathers lounge around pools and swimmers limber up before finally diving in; where we find people doing yoga and various exercise routines both indoors and out; where walkers and joggers take us out into the countryside, or into the city with their dogs. These physical activities both leisure and sporting would undoubtedly leave some of their protagonists out of breath, as the title of the monograph suggests, and may well inspire some viewers to shake off any lethargy and get physical too. But despite their clear iconography and endorphin-rousing semiotics, Senior's paintings are no mere campaign to get, or to keep, art lovers fit and healthy. For they are also carefully conceived and meticulously executed studies of the human body, of shape, line and form, of colour, tone, light and shadow. They are engaging explorations of composition and and colour, pattern and geometry, textures and materials, the natural and the manmade. This interplay between the natural and synthetic is played out in surprising juxtapositions, such as blue rubber exercise balls in dialogue with various-sized cacti, or between the materials and designs of sports clothing in contrast to the rolling hills of a spring landscape, or to autumnal trees at sunset. There are many other intriguing tropes, devices and recurring motifs within Senior's repertoire, from cast iron grilles to unorthodox hats and hairstyles, perhaps leading his stylised vocabulary into the realms of nineteenth-century symbolist painting as much as into the health clubs, spas, leisure centres and parks of today. Indeed, there is a strange sense of timelessness to Senior's practice that is matched by a captivating sense of silence, loneliness and isolation, despite the figures often being present in couples, clusters or small groups. Behind their toned physiques, stripy towels and goggles, underneath their winter coats, cagoules and peaked caps, there are, perhaps, some small glimmers of inner lives of sentient, intellectual, cultured, emotional, sexual beings trapped within. Senior's oeuvre is, in many ways, preoccupied with repression and expression, freedom and conformity, motion and stasis, balance and inertia, engagement and disengagement. One might even describe it as a bittersweet analogy of the human body for human states of mind, for energy versus futility, effort versus relaxation, health versus decline. 60 colour photos

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9781910221068

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Ben Street is a freelance art historian, museum educator and writer, with clients including the National Gallery, Tate, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sotheby's Institute of Art, Christie's Education, and the Royal Academy. He is a regular contributor to Art Review. Matt Price is a publisher, editor and writer working in London. Former Managing Editor of Flash Art, Milan, and Deputy Editor at ArtReview, London, he has also worked as Publications Manager at Serpentine Galleries, London, and as an editor for Hans Ulrich Obrist. Price has edited more than fifty catalogues, monographs and books including Phaidon's international anthologies of painting and drawing Vitamin P2 and D2, as well as titles for Hatje Cantz, Rizzoli, Thames & Hudson and Koenig Books. He has written for magazines including Art Monthly, Art Quarterly, ArtReview, Flash Art, Frieze and Modern Painters. Gabor Gyory is a freelance curator, writer and lecturer on art, art history and architecture. Formerly co-founder and director of the contemporary gallery Twelve Around One in Shoreditch, London, he has curated numerous exhibitions including Verlan (2012), Phosphene (2013), and Salient (2013). He also currently writes for E.R.O.S. Sacha Craddock is an independent art critic, writer and curator based in London. In addition to having been a regular critic for The Guardian and The Times, she has also been a judge for the Turner Prize and the John Moores Painting Prize, and has been chair of Bloomberg New Contemporaries since 1996. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and publications.

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