Kristin Baker

Kristin Baker (born 1975, in Stamford, Connecticut) is a painter based in New York. She often uses stencil and sign painting techniques upon PVC panels.

Baker holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University, Boston (1998), and graduated from Yale’s MA Painting programme (2002).

Her play-act has been exhibited in many prominent international galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Royal Academy in London and The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Her statute is featured in the Saatchi Collection, and she is represented by Deitch Projects, New York.

2003 Flat Out and 2005 Fall Out

Baker’s solo debut in New York, Flat Out, was presented by Deitch Projects in September 2003 and her subsequent Los Angeles debut, Fall Out, was presented by Acme in March 2005. Both exhibitions continued the artist’s incorporation in auto racing by exploring, “the connection between painting and automobile racing, particularly by the contrast between accident versus direct that characterizes both pursuits.”

In Debra Singer's article for Artforum the proceed is explained within a cultural context. “ Baker explains that she started to comprehend racing as a microcosm of American capitalism, given the sport’s inherent ties to technological build up and corporate sponsorship.” But however specific the subject of auto racing may be, the work still maneuvers itself in the broader prudence of painting. Singer explains, “Despite such culturally specific associations, many paintings transform representational details into predominantly formal elements, as in Ride to Live, Live to Ride, 2004. The up-close vantage of a moment snappishly following an explosive crash, when smoke clouds the view of drivers and viewers alike, is dominated by vibrant, propulsive shards that radiate outward, interlacing afterward billowing flows of sooty haze. . The flurry of edges and forms, reminiscent of the ornamental impulse of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, imbues the scene of destruction considering a paradoxical, almost floral delicacy, as translucent and opaque layers of paint overlap in imitation of scraps of torn tissue, beautiful despite circumstance.”

Bakers paintings during this era are somewhere between the representational world and the abstract one. New York based writer Rebecca Spence spoke similar to Baker more or less this heritage in her article called Boundary Issues:

"In Baker’s wall-size Portrait of a Whatever Agricultural Excursion (2005), what at first appears to be an abstract pastiche of fluid shapes is, upon closer examination, an overturned race car. As her play a role has evolved exceeding the considering several years, Baker says she is less enliven of ‘riding the boundary’ between the historically disparate modes. 'I used to look them as two rotate things that I would bring together, but now I feel in the same way as they've dissolved into one another.'"

Flat Out also featured freestanding sculptural works such as Kurotoplac Kurve that the performer would explore new in subsequent shows.

2007 Surge and Shadow

For her second solo at Deitch Projects, Baker started disturbing away from the subject of auto racing, but not from the occupation and rapidity it allowed in prior work. Ethan Greenbaum notes:

“The large-scale installation features a series of painting hybrids as well as wall mounted, rectilinear works. Baker has jettisoned her racecar motif in favor of an exposure to air of rapidity itself…Walking through the show, I thought of the Italian Futurists, all bluster and dark optimism virtually the mechanistic concord of the additional century.”

Not solitary are the Futurists brought to mind, the pretend also bears references to Marcel Duchamp and Théodore Géricault. “A riff upon Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” imagines it unpeopled and overcome by tattered waves; in a twist on Ab Ex gesture, frenzied brushstrokes are isolated, cleaned up, and tidily placed in the characterize plane.”

The spectator is now turned from the occupation and keenness of the racetrack to the uncertainty of a raft in the stormy sea. Jennifer coarse writes, “Baker’s reconstitution of the raft is comparable to the lightheartedness of her race cars: both are blown apart and we are engaged later a heightened desirability of an accrual of moments in time. Although her mark-making is definitely controlled, calculated even, the spectator and the raft are immersed in a answer of painting, drowning in painting as a material fact. Like Géricault, Baker is using the conviction and protest that only a contemporary incident, in her engagement the “mechanical” process of painting itself, to living the work...What we look here is the scratchy anachronistic interface, the crash, between two traditions of high art: history painting, seen here as a dissipated raft and sublime landscape, and abstract painting embodied in crashing waves of color.

The new major be in from Surge and Shadow is a sculptural fragment entitled Flying Curve, Differential Manifold. Picking going on from similar past works (Kurotoplac Kurve), Flying Curve, Differential Manifold is upon a new scale. Again, Jennifer improper explains that, “ Flying Curve is in allocation inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s last painting, Tu m’” and was “Duchamp’s goodbye to painting.” However Baker’s aspiration is not an decrease to painting, but rather she seems inspired and challenged by the notion. “Baker has followed through upon Duchamp’s conceptual curve ball to painting, speeding in the works and dispersing its forms at ten mature its indigenous scale, enveloping the viewer in sublime kaleidoscope of color and form. Baker’s produce a result reveals her belief that painting nevertheless has somewhere to take us and that Duchamp’s university endgame, embodied in Tu m’, took her beside a alleyway to painting despite Duchamp's protestations.”