Kristin Baker

Illume-Mine presents the newest paintings by artist Kristin Baker (born 1975), from 2011–2013. Baker’s compositions often involve the distortion of light and color: rectangles float like prisms through which red turns to purple, white fans out and tangerine comes in and out of focus. At the core of her work, which has developed over the course of a decade, is an exploration of the boundaries and expectations of the painted medium. The abstract works in this catalogue extend this investigation. In these new paintings, visual and process-oriented allusions to photography, printmaking and other two-dimensional media combine to reveal a diverse acrylic idiom. Illume-Mine is also the first publication to feature Baker’s Minums--small paintings whose scale reflects the size of notebook paper but displays the same dramatic effects as the large-scale works. This monograph was edited by Nikki Columbus and includes an essay by Suzanne Hudson.

Surge and Shadow presents ambitious new work by Kristin Baker, formerly best known for her critically-acclaimed paintings of automobile racing. In the large-scale acrylic paintings on PVC gathered here, Baker riffs on very different subject matter: historical paintings ranging back from the New York School to encompass nineteenth-century Romanticism and history painting. In this body of work, one senses the sweeping dramatic symphonies and tragic wreckages of Turner and the Romantic painters of the early nineteenth century so that Baker's crashing colors gain impact from the heft of her materials and technique, unleashing a "visual force field that absorbs the viewer in the passion of the moment," according to Yale University Art Gallery's Jennifer Gross.
Also included are Baker's recent explorations of freestanding painting-constructions that approach sculptural dimensions. Kristin Baker attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and received her MFA from Yale University in 2002. Deitch Projects presented her first solo exhibition, Flat Out, in New York in September of 2003.