Land and Sea

This summer, Alexander and Bonin will exhibit land and seascapes by Matthew Benedict, Robert Bordo, Neil Jenney, Stefan Kürten, Ree Morton, Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Glen Rubsamen. Land and Sea presents seven painters whose varied approaches to the landscape range from plein air observation to an almost total artificiality.

Matthew Benedict’s recent show at Alexander and Bonin explored ceremonies that take place at sea when ships cross the equator. He has repeatedly explored sea imagery in his portraits of pirates, sailors and saints. The landscape frequently figures in his paintings as a setting for narratives or as a decorative motif presented in the illusionistic manner of woodblock wallpaper.                                    

Preexisting two-dimensional images such as maps and postcards often inspire Robert Bordo’s paintings. In his recent work, the ‘postcards’ are painted as stacked planes of landscape, densely filling the canvases. In contrast to this ‘stacking’, the landscape imagery often travels over the surface of the planes creating a tension between the perceived layering and a continuous surface.

One of Neil Jenney’s recent North America Divided paintings will be exhibited. This work is one of Jenney’s “concerned” paintings, his central body of work since the early 1970s. In these works, Jenney displays a degree of finesse that is the antithesis of his so-called ‘bad’ (or “unconcerned”) paintings of 1969. North America Divided depicts a slice of landscape with a portion of a tree trunk at its center.