August 24–27, 2023
Booth 11
Steve Turner is pleased to participate at Enter Art Fair with eight international artists, four of whom live in the United States, and four of whom live in Europe. While the artists have different motivations and painterly techniques, as an ensemble, there is a harmony that comes from the juxtaposition of idiosyncratic paintings that are personal and poetic, and which stand apart from popular trends. All have recently or will soon show with us in Los Angeles, but Copenhagen has its own appeal as a city with an impressive history of supporting innovative artists from elsewhere.
Pablo Benzo (born 1982, Santiago, lives Berlin) creates paintings that are inspired by imagination, dream, design and nature. The paintings have a tropical island feeling as though they depict blue skies and oceans, fiery sunsets, green hills and exotic plants, fruits and flowers. Yet there are no such scenes. Benzo mostly creates exotic interior scenes that contain windows to the outer world. The juxtapositions combine biomorphic forms and rectilinear geometry which enable the viewer to inhabit an exotic installation of art and design. The scenes are imagined and emotional, rhythmic and musical. According to Benzo,”I hope to emulate the experience of looking at a river from a fixed point. While you observe the same scene, the flowing water is always different.”
Jingze Du (born 1995, Yantai, China, lives Dublin, Ireland) creates paintings which represent the artist’s love of American popular culture, art history and painting itself, interests that Du formed during the first thirteen years of his life in Yantai, China and the next fifteen in Dublin, Ireland. His vantage point is an interesting one, for though he only visited the United States for the first time in February, 2023, he has admired its culture from afar and has made it a subject in his work for the last five years. Paintings from two of his idiosyncratic styles will be presented at Enter, one that is meticulous and which is comprised of on thinned down oil in shades of black, gray and white and the other which characterized by loosely painted gestures, swiftly made, with choppy and feathery details, all in shades of gray.
Bianca Fields (born 1995, Cleveland, lives Boston) creates paintings of screaming animals that the artist considers stand-ins for the psyche of her six-year-old self, one who spent hours watching cartoons as a child. Fields works with intense passion along with a well controlled silent concentration. The resulting works have thick flourishes of lustrous colors as well as scratched lines and text that convey violence and vulnerability, something that Fields routinely experiences as an African American woman.
Kate Klingbeil (born 1990, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, lives Milwaukee) creates highly textured, multi-layered paintings that depict scenes of nature, especially the small creatures that live underground, in pools of water and in plants and trees. It is the less visible nature of grubs, bugs, snails and ants, a nature that you have to look very closely to see, but a nature that Klingbeil has relished since childhood. It is a magical world in her paintings, a world that runs parallel to the complexities of the human body and its emotional system. Small details coalesce to form larger images.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed (born 1984, Stanford, California, lives Durham, North Carolina) has a multifaceted studio practice for which drawing and humor are central. At Enter, McNamee-Tweed will present a new group of paintings on which he incises a drawn line into clay, adds color with glazes and fires the clay to yield a ceramic painting. These works are modest in scale, often not much larger than a sheet of paper. But they are not paper-thin. They have depth and weight and have the feel of a book, a category of object that McNamee-Tweed values above all others, including art.
Brittany Miller (born 1990, Utica, lives New York City) creates paintings that depict figures in contemplation within domestic settings. Sofas, beds, pillows, sheets and open books are often included in the patterned scenes. Miller adds complexity by painstakingly applying oil paint in straight or undulating parallel lines. In so doing, she also conveys mystery through the emptiness that lies between the lines.
Yuma Radne (born 2001, Ulaan Ude, Lives Vienna) creates paintings which are inspired by the memories of her youth spent in Buryatia, a republic in Siberia, that has a significant population of indigenous Mongols to which Radne belongs. She depicts blue nymph-like creatures that inhabit a colorful landscape. Some stand in water, some stand on the land while others ride flying fish. According to Radne, “I grew up in a colorful world where the sky had more than a million colors, wise people shaved their beige heads and trees were adorned with colorful ribbons. Only after I left my homeland did I begin to see such colors in my mind’s eye.”
Luca Sára Rózsa (born 1990, Budapest, lives Budapest) creates lustrous and expressive paintings that depict unclothed humans within nature. As the artist describes it, “nature plays a different role within the philosophical approaches developed in the East and the West. Eastern philosophies attest to a balanced juxtaposition, the yin and yang of nature, whereas the Western approach is organized upon a hierarchy, with man on the top and everything else lined up below in order to serve him. The figures in my paintings are mammals who have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and have been expelled from Paradise. They are fully exposed to their fate, facing it either with resignation or hope.”
