Benjamin Smith retrospective closes this Saturday
Ben Smith, Seated Figure with Masks, 1969, woodblock print. Photo courtesty BenSmithArt.com.
Mason Murer’s Mark Karelson and Twenty21 Collections’ Erin Wertenberger have, as Wertenberger reports, recently decided to begin hosting a series of exhibitions intended to create a history of living Atlanta artists, beginning with legendary veterans James Yarbrough and Benjamin Smith. Yarbrough’s wizardry with egg tempera and encaustic deserves its own review, but Smith is the priority here for several reasons, cited below.
Smith’s exhibition at Mason Murer, which closes on March 20, features a selective semi-retrospective of the woodcuts of the 68-year-old (69 on March 18) Atlanta artist who made some of the American art world’s larger examples of the genre (using sheets of plywood as the printing blocks). It also contains a sizable number of the newest of Smith’s exquisitely crafted drawings–drawings that, in the words of Wertenberger, betray “an extraordinarily wicked wit.”
His accomplishments in woodcuts can be viewed on his website. The recent drawings, some of which can be had unframed for as little as $95, can for the most part be viewed only in the gallery.
It’s remarkable that a significant part of Smith’s prodigious output should be available at prices closer to those found in emerging-artist galleries. It is even more remarkable that less than a week before the show’s closing, a major percentage of the unframed drawings were still available.
The failure of collectors to take full advantage of an unheard-of bargain may simply stem from a lack of publicity, or may have something to do with Smith’s combination of classical composition and perversely visionary humor. His figures typically seem to come from the Middle Ages by way of Mardi Gras, and the dramas they enact are sometimes obscure, often lovely, and almost always disturbing.
Ben Smith, Getting a Head at A.I.G., 2009, mixed media. Photo courtesy BenSmithArt.com.
Smith notes that the drawings are as darkly comic as the woodcuts are serious, and that their improbable titles come after the drawing itself is established as an integral work of art. The titles frequently undermine the dynamic established by the drawing itself, and are as topical as the visual themes are timeless: Getting a Head at A.I.G. is only one example, in which the appealing mix of technique and the visual romance of the historically costumed figures is negated by the fact that the details of the picture are comically horrific and the scene is further destabilized by the wry title.
A few drawings are straight moments of fantasy, such as one of Faustus conjuring, but most contain contemporary references (one is purportedly about sequencing the human genome) and all are vaguely unsettling. The late patron and collector Judith Alexander once told Smith, “The thing that’s disturbing about your humor is that your humor is absolutely serious.”
That puts Smith squarely in line with the ironic mindset of artists fifty years his junior.
A well-known critic, poet, and ART PAPERS staff member, Dr. Jerry Cullum has been a keen observer of the metro Atlanta scene for decades.
