Ena Swansea: stuck in neutral

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Ben Brown Fine Arts is delighted to present stuck in neutral, the second solo exhibition of Ena Swansea to be held at the Hong Kong gallery, taking place between 30 September – 30 November 2022. The exhibition will feature a group of vibrant, ingeniously imaginative and masterfully rendered new paintings from the New York-based artist.

The exhibition title, stuck in neutral, refers to an illusory, slippery transition from a global pandemic back to simpler times. The group of nine paintings present initially familiar motifs – snow covered fields, roiling ocean waves, bucolic allées and autumnal forests – yet upon deeper engagement become disquietingly surreal and enigmatic. Characterized by their ambiguity, Swansea’s paintings do not offer a specific narrative, therefore allowing flexibility for the viewer in their perception of them. Swansea’s paintings unveil the everchanging state of our moment, the dense landscapes in her work revealing traces of human life and whispers of sly humor that hint at the optimism through which she views the future; the enjoyment of the ethereal and spectral figures is apparent throughout this body of work.

In kill the headlights and put it in neutral, 2022, a driverless car glides into the picture plane with a Viking woman standing on top carrying a skull-adorned apparatus, and in the background, a long- abandoned NASCAR racetrack that still exists in a pine forest in North Carolina is depicted. This hidden landscape rich with history and stories of the past is reflective of Swansea’s own Southern roots, which she often references in her practice. This relationship is seen again in abandoned ticket booth at the abandoned NASCAR racetrack, 2022, where the small, empty wooden building in the forest slowly decays under the blazing sun. The work is painted directly on wood, reinforcing the sublime beauty and vulnerability of this natural element.

A similarly incongruous figure exists in red clay cliff, 2022, which features a transparent metallic silhouette of a man taking a selfie on the edge of a cliff high above a racetrack and encourages us to question the identity of the figure – perhaps it is a ghost of the Indigenous tribes who watched over this landscape for thousands of years, or maybe just a reference to the ubiquity of selfies. From the tiny people in the distance near 5th Avenue gazing out across the snowy waterscape in Central Park pond, 2019, to snowy field, 2022, where a woman in a red bikini reaches over to touch the snow she is inexplicably resting on, the paintings gradually confront us with their intriguing obscurity.

Swansea addresses the ephemerality both of humanity and the natural world with intricate detail and nuance. ocean, 2022, depicts a microcosmic water and storm system presented in a yellow painted artist’s frame, the complicated topology of the ocean seemingly analyzed and mapped out, almost mathematically. Highlighted by the storm clouds that emerge from the horizon, the viewer is effortlessly immersed in a painting that seems to take its image from far out at sea.

road, 2021, pollarded trees, 2021 and pollarded trees, 2022, are three paintings that illuminate Swansea’s fascination with tree growth patterns and how they can be altered to create wild and unfamiliar forms with careful human intervention. Swansea has long studied these ‘living sculptures’ in the south of France, producing hundreds of photographs from which the paintings find their origins.

Swansea gathers inspiration for her paintings from the trove of photographs she has taken over the years, as well as from her background in film. Swansea perceives her paintings as film stills, and by employing repeating forms found in nature, she sees a graphic impact that brings a fresh excitement of drawing into the realm of painting. Ben Brown Fine Arts looks forward to sharing Swansea’s innovative and exhilarating new paintings in the exhibition stuck in neutral at the Hong Kong gallery.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Ena Swansea was born in 1966 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and studied film and painting at the University of South Florida. Swansea’s work has been exhibited internationally at prominent institutions including MoMA PS1, New York; Saatchi Gallery, London; Deichtorhallen, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg; and Musée d’Art Moderne (MUDAM), Luxembourg. Swansea’s work is included in numerous public and private collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York; Colby College Museum, Maine; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg; and Olbricht Collection, Berlin. Swansea lives and works in New York City.