Curating exhibitions is an art in itself and when the curator is herself a participating artist the exhibition is bound to be all the more artful. Thus curator Basha Maryanska gives us another thoughtfully assembled group exhibition in the show she calls ‘Art in Residency.’
Working mainly in oil and paint stick on canvas and wood panels, Sandra Benhaim creates what the artist refers to as “little pieces of landscape” within an overall context of abstraction. Elements of collage also figure prominently in Benhaim’s paintings: fragments of maps, colorful flyers, scraps of magazine pictures gathered from the painter’s trips to faraway places such as Paris and the Bahamas. A sense of windblown memories and fantasies comes across in paintings such as Benhaim’s “Carpet Ride Redux,” in which ornate bits of patterned paper float under and over areas of semitransparent and opaque areas of orange, blue, and pink paint suggesting sunlight, sea, and perhaps the pink flesh of bathers. In other paintings, such as “Exploring Ganymede,” the artist herself bathes in the freedom of pure painterly sensuousness, employing an entire palette of vibrant colors energized by her vigorous brushwork.
by Wilson Wong
Sandra Benhaim’s exhibit was reviewed in the June/July/August 2014 issue.
