Keren Benbenisty

Tristeza II

January 12—February 17, 2024

Opening Reception: Friday, January 12, 6—8 pm

Ulterior Gallery is pleased to present Tristeza II, a solo exhibition introducing new works by Keren Benbenisty. The exhibition opens on Friday, January 12, with an artist's reception from 6 to 8 pm.

The artist’s attempt to cultivate a blue orange is at the center of Tristeza II, which consists of a video and works on paper that examine the theme of return to and migration from one’s supposed homeland. Return and migration seem like opposite moves, but disentangling the “leaving” from the “return” turns out to be impossible. Each movement holds, perhaps is even trapped in, its potential opposite. 

The video—also named "Tristeza," a lethal virus that infects citrus trees and the Spanish/Portuguese word for "sadness"—addresses the duality that the orange represents for Benbenisty personally. Exploring pasts, presents, and futures-that-could-have-been, the works of the show convey a sense of failure and impossibility that capture her ambivalent feelings about the land of her birth.

Keren Benbenisty was born in Israel in 1977 and moved to Paris in 1998, and currently lives and works in New York, NY. In 2004 she graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and attended California Institute of the Arts. Benbenisty was an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009 and has been the recipient of numerous international grants and residences, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2019. Recent exhibitions include: Tristeza, Ulterior Gallery (2021); Bluranj, Figura Avulsa, Lisbon, Portugal (2021); Memories in Threads, Arts Maebashi, Gunma, Japan (2020); Point of Departure, The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2019); Fajja, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Petach Tikva, Israel (2018); Apparatus for a Utopian Image 2.0, Centre for Contemporary Arts Prague, Czech Republic (2018); Unexpected Encounter, Arts Maebashi, Gunma, Japan (2018); and Under Erasure, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2014).

Exhibition Text by G.B.

Press

Art Spiel Blue As An Orange. February 2, 2024.