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 put on an 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 take steps 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 inclusion in auto racing by exploring, “the membership between painting and automobile racing, particularly by the contrast between crash versus direct that characterizes both pursuits.”

In Debra Singer's article for Artforum the exploit is explained within a cultural context. “ Baker explains that she started to understand racing as a microcosm of American capitalism, given the sport’s inherent ties to technological loan and corporate sponsorship.” But however specific the subject of auto racing may be, the work yet 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 rapidly following an explosive crash, when smoke clouds the view of drivers and viewers alike, is dominated by vibrant, propulsive shards that radiate outward, interlacing in imitation of 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 when a paradoxical, almost floral delicacy, as translucent and opaque layers of paint overlap considering scraps of torn tissue, beautiful despite circumstance.”

Bakers paintings during this time are somewhere amid the representational world and the abstract one. New York based writer Rebecca Spence spoke bearing in mind Baker not quite this line 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 nebulous shapes is, upon closer examination, an overturned race car. As her produce an effect has evolved higher than the when several years, Baker says she is less sentient of ‘riding the boundary’ between the historically disparate modes. 'I used to see them as two substitute things that I would bring together, but now I feel as soon as they've dissolved into one another.'"

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

2007 Surge and Shadow

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

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

Not unaccompanied are the Futurists brought to mind, the perform also bears references to Marcel Duchamp and Théodore Géricault. “A riff on 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 action and readiness of the racetrack to the uncertainty of a raft in the stormy sea. Jennifer indecent writes, “Baker’s reconstitution of the raft is comparable to the freshness of her race cars: both are blown apart and we are engaged taking into consideration a heightened sense of an mass of moments in time. Although her mark-making is very controlled, calculated even, the spectator and the raft are immersed in a confession of painting, drowning in painting as a material fact. Like Géricault, Baker is using the conviction and bother that abandoned a contemporary incident, in her stroke the “mechanical” process of painting itself, to liven up the work...What we see here is the unfriendly anachronistic interface, the crash, between two traditions of tall art: history painting, seen here as a dissipated raft and sublime landscape, and abstract painting embodied in crashing waves of color.

The additional major act out from Surge and Shadow is a sculptural fragment entitled Flying Curve, Differential Manifold. Picking taking place from thesame past works (Kurotoplac Kurve), Flying Curve, Differential Manifold is upon a supplementary scale. Again, Jennifer Gross explains that, “ Flying Curve is in portion inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s last painting, Tu m’” and was “Duchamp’s farewell to painting.” However Baker’s objective is not an terminate to painting, but rather she seems inspired and challenged by the notion. “Baker has followed through on Duchamp’s conceptual curve ball to painting, speeding in the works and dispersing its forms at ten become old its indigenous scale, enveloping the viewer in sublime kaleidoscope of color and form. Baker’s take steps reveals her belief that painting yet has somewhere to take us and that Duchamp’s school endgame, embodied in Tu m’, took her all along a path to painting despite Duchamp's protestations.”