Becky Kinder, Untitled Venus Figure, 2022, oil on canvas, 66 x 73"
Please join us Saturday, April 1, from 5-7 for the opening of The Grass of Graves, a show of new work by Becky Kinder curated by Rebecca Baldwin.
Location: Hercules Art/Studio Program, 25 Park Place, 3rd floor, NYC
On view: April 1-29
Gallery hours: Saturdays 1-5 or by appointment, please call or text 347-393-0446
The Grass of Graves is an exploration of growth and loss through ancient representations of women’s bodies. Becky Kinder’s practice in painting, ceramics, and printmaking abstracts and rediscovers the commonality of these human forms, turning them around again and again until they are oriented toward new beginnings.
Prehistoric ceramic female figures, which are clearly present in Kinder’s work but lack a specific referent, are often called “Venus” figurines. Even though they originated in cultures we know very little about, modern societies have projected meanings back at them that have, over time, settled into a thick layer of interpretations.
One theory about “Venus” figurines proposes that they are sculpted by people looking down at their own bodies, a logic that accounts for the distorted proportions. Hips and thighs are thick and bulbous, feet are small and far away. Heads are unseen. Kinder’s forms, too, are self-reflective—they describe a period of growing older when fertility wanes and our time spent seems as important as the time awaiting us. Her palette of rich greens, warm yellows, and deep browns reaches back to the era of her own birth in the 1970s and to her own mother, aware of the loss of that time and the capacity for change that birth makes thinkable. Her work invites this self-reflexivity from the viewer as well: when and from where are new things born? Can novel forms bring forth the unexpected? How do we reach for possibility?
Kinder’s forms have sprouted out of a rich soil of personal and art history and include references to Baroque ornament, the curves of biomorphic sculpture, and other styles of heavy abundance. Through these images and shapes, leaves twine and unfurl and heavy heads of grain tumble down. Ferns propagate. The fertility of plants and bodies repeat each other, evolving into a more-than-human aliveness that encompasses growth of all kinds, biological and metaphorical.
Kinder’s artwork thinks across and with many mediums. In this rich variety is an immense capacity for reflection, one form to another, producing a glimpse of something new with each of the endless combinations. These green and growing visual environments turn us all to the problem and promise of new beginnings.
-Sara Clugage
The Grass of Graves exhibits Becky Kinder’s newest work. Previously, Kinder has shown at Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, North Orange Gallery in Montclair and the artist run spaces Black Ball Projects, GridSpace, and Regina Rex in Brooklyn. She has attended residencies at Skowhegan and the Wassaic Project and has an MFA from Hunter College.
