The Unfair Advantage

Kristin Baker’s explosive The Unfair Advantage dates from a period of the early 2000s which saw the artist return repeatedly to the colours and themes of the world of motor racing: at the opening of her 2004 exhibition at Deitch Projects the artist herself took attendees on high-speed rides in a range of sports cars outside the gallery. Though perhaps less explicit in its automotive interests than other works from this period, the painting nonetheless owes much to the lacquered colour schemes and furious speed of the motorsport world: striped patterns fragment, glossy shards of Ferrari red are hurled across the canvas, and spray-painted oily white clouds smear the colours beneath them. While recalling the constellations of sharp, geometric forms characteristic of the modernist abstract pioneers, Baker’s large-scale sign-painting techniques and use of acrylic paints and PVC give the work a consumerist, almost digital sheen. In Baker’s vision, abstraction is not, as it was for someone like Malevich or Kandinsky, a conduit for spiritual mysticism; rather, it is the product of a Ballardian world disintegrating as it accelerates into the future, seeking ever faster forms of excitement.