Trudy Benson (born 1985 in Richmond, Virginia) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from the Pratt Institute (New York) and BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond). Trudy Benson’s painterly layers continuously redefine themselves, redefine their own bounds: Even as they prod at the aesthetics of organisational logics— networks, sequences, grid—they remain in good-humoured flux. But as Benson arranges her sloppy tables and squares, taping lines and masking sections of canvas to create depth, disarray, dizzy dynamism, it is not only the sparring layers that come into focus. Instead, we glimpse the very act of painterly layering: that which establishes a perspectival hierarchy so as to determine the manner in which we interact with (and interpret) images.
Benson’s paintings are often discussed in relation to the ‘digital turn’: the recent moment at which contemporary painters began interacting with digital vocabularies and emerging methods of technological production. In certain ways, the alignment holds: Benson has described her early works as ‘still lives of digital programs’, and her aesthetic surely mimics that of elementary image manipulation programs. In a certain light, the loose interconnectedness of her compositions could also allude to the transitory logic of digital space, while her lither gestural marks are reminiscent of those left by fingers on screens: ghostly smudges that sit somewhere between intent, expression and abstraction of the self.
She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria; Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT; SUNNY, New York, NY; Massif Central, Brussels, Belgium; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; and Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Étienne, France. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Krinzinger Schottenfeld, Vienna, Austria; Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY; m.simons, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany; and The Hole, East Hampton, NY.
Benson’s work may be found in the collections of the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, New York, NY; Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA; and the Susan and Michael Hort Collection, New York, NY.