“My artistic and intellectual pursuits are grounded in a simple sense of purpose: to be fully alive.”
Galerie Steph is proud to present “Incarnate”, the first Singapore exhibition of New York- based Filipino artist Jana Benitez. Deeply engaged with expressing emotions and abstract concepts, Benitez states that “there are so many different ways to portray a certain emotion, mood, look and feeling. The slightest change in angle or colour in the artwork can change the whole painting as well as what the viewer feels. I want to explore all these”. The show will feature the artist’s Abstract Expressionist paintings and will run from 11 May – 30 June 2012.
Benitez’s paintings remind us how abstract paintings can be so powerfully beautiful and provocative. Vivid colours and energetic lines converge on sweeping compositions. Reflective of the Abstract Expressionist style which dominated post-war art, her paintings demonstrate a confident display of composition, form, colour and space. Her work evinces the deconstruction of facial features, allowing eyes, ears, mouths and necks to become interchangeable parts. However, Benitez breaks with AbEx orthodoxy and radically injects her own unique humanistic essence into her work in the forms of faces and the human body - a bold defiant act. Agonized faces and contorted bodies implore our attention, recalling artists like Willem de Kooning, who notoriously introduced human figuration and abstraction into his art.
Sensitivity and perception have always been inherent in Benitez’s work. At a precocious 12 years of age, she held her first solo exhibition at the Ayala Museum, aptly titled “Faces: Masked Moods” where she espoused her “growing interest in faces... alive with character and expression”. Benitez demonstrates emotional maturity and thoughtfulness in her paintings, capturing the universal, poignant narrative of the human spirit.
About Jana Benitez
Born in New York to a Filipino family, Jana Benitez had her first solo exhibition at age 12, quickly followed by her second solo show at age 14. She has also exhibited in New York, the Philippines and Berlin. Her works are included in important private and public collections in New Zealand and the Philippines, and has been featured in publications such as Art News and Asian Art News. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a B.A. in visual arts in 2008, and has also studied martial arts at a Daoist temple in China.
