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Lot Essay
‘As in Baker’s racing paintings, in The Raft of Perseus landscape is interwoven with culture, and infuses the human endeavour with pictorial and actual drama. But since Baker’s raft has been de-populated, what is the human endeavour offered here? It seems that it is painting itself. In Baker’s painting the vulnerable raft of art history is dispersed and infused with abstract forms’
–Jennifer R. Gross
Plunging the viewer into a gigantic vista almost four metres across, The Raft of Perseus (2006) is a majestic example of Kristin Baker’s vibrant, dynamic and highly distinctive style. The composition, based on Géricault’s 1824 painting The Raft of the Medusa, sees abstracted planks, shards, sails and masts of colour – which echo the sharp shapes and hues of Constructivism or De Stijl – beset by huge, foamy sweeps of blue, white and turquoise ocean. The sky beyond, thundering with smoky greys and acrid yellows, churns in ragged wisps like a torn collage. To create her environment-sized works, Baker paints on PVC rather than canvas, and uses not brushes but spatulas, knives and masking tape. The exuberant gloss, light and weightlessness of her materials heightens her works’ impression of speed, danger and excitement: her earlier paintings, while learning from the abstract vigour of Futurism, were directly informed by the Nascar racetracks she was obsessed with as a child growing up in Stamford, Connecticut. Moving on from motorsports, later paintings saw Baker engage with epic spectacle and drama throughout art history. Another of these, Wind Over Matter (2004), which reinterprets J.M.W. Turner’s 1835 The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, is held in the Guggenheim collection. In the present work, her relationship with The Raft of the Medusa raised new questions for the artist. ‘Was I just drawing from the general energy of it, or was I interested in redepicting it for our time?’ she asked. ‘I’m still going back and forth with this one’ (K. Baker, quoted in D. Kazanjian, ‘Color Surge’, Vogue, March 2008, p. 584). Her title slyly highlights the grand ambition of her revising such a masterpiece: Perseus, in Greek mythology, was the slayer of Medusa. Although Baker’s source remains recognisable, The Raft of Perseus sees that ‘general energy’ transformed for the modern age, its slick support, breakneck movement and smears and shafts of spectacular colour taking us to the thrilling brink of disaster.
–Jennifer R. Gross
Plunging the viewer into a gigantic vista almost four metres across, The Raft of Perseus (2006) is a majestic example of Kristin Baker’s vibrant, dynamic and highly distinctive style. The composition, based on Géricault’s 1824 painting The Raft of the Medusa, sees abstracted planks, shards, sails and masts of colour – which echo the sharp shapes and hues of Constructivism or De Stijl – beset by huge, foamy sweeps of blue, white and turquoise ocean. The sky beyond, thundering with smoky greys and acrid yellows, churns in ragged wisps like a torn collage. To create her environment-sized works, Baker paints on PVC rather than canvas, and uses not brushes but spatulas, knives and masking tape. The exuberant gloss, light and weightlessness of her materials heightens her works’ impression of speed, danger and excitement: her earlier paintings, while learning from the abstract vigour of Futurism, were directly informed by the Nascar racetracks she was obsessed with as a child growing up in Stamford, Connecticut. Moving on from motorsports, later paintings saw Baker engage with epic spectacle and drama throughout art history. Another of these, Wind Over Matter (2004), which reinterprets J.M.W. Turner’s 1835 The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, is held in the Guggenheim collection. In the present work, her relationship with The Raft of the Medusa raised new questions for the artist. ‘Was I just drawing from the general energy of it, or was I interested in redepicting it for our time?’ she asked. ‘I’m still going back and forth with this one’ (K. Baker, quoted in D. Kazanjian, ‘Color Surge’, Vogue, March 2008, p. 584). Her title slyly highlights the grand ambition of her revising such a masterpiece: Perseus, in Greek mythology, was the slayer of Medusa. Although Baker’s source remains recognisable, The Raft of Perseus sees that ‘general energy’ transformed for the modern age, its slick support, breakneck movement and smears and shafts of spectacular colour taking us to the thrilling brink of disaster.