FEATURE STATEMENT
Davidson Galleries is pleased to share new work from Seattle artist Ben Beres. Featured are seven new marbled monoprints from 2022. A master of words, Beres has long worked with text as both impossibly small, scratchy scribbles, and as bold, brash declarations. His text and imagery mine and meld conversations, captions, questions, obsessive musings, logos, lyrics, cartoons, portraits, and limbs among many other sources. In 2020, Beres expanded his printmaking practice to include hand-marbled monoprints that illuminate short bursts of text in bright color. Using the long history and tradition behind printmaking, Beres’s marbled monoprints showcase a new, direct, expressive side of his vocabulary as a continuation of and contrast to some of his more convoluted and intimate etchings.
Beres’s new marbled monoprints continue to play with the idea of the indecipherable, breaking words in unexpected places, twisting and warping letters, letting color take over and tell the story. The color is even more vibrant, the layers of text and marbling more united. While the colors are increasingly lively, the text’s meaning darkens with phrases like There Is No Why, Falling Apart, and a never-ending string of sorries. Constantly teetering between depression and celebration, glee and dismay, these new works investigate the duality of life, admittedly the happiest and saddest experience we can submit ourselves to. Sometimes tender, sometimes abrasive, sometimes melancholy, a sense of personal turmoil seeps into these works, perhaps putting on a brave face of color for the viewer. Beres utilizes the natural elements of chance, play, and fight for control built into the marbling technique to create completely unique monoprints that delve into complex, universal experiences.
Please view these new works from Ben Beres alongside his other works offered by Davidson Galleries on our website here: Collection | Ben Beres or call/email to make an appointment to view them in person.
Link to Seattle Channel Art Zone video on Ben’s marbling technique: https://www.seattlechannel.org/videos?videoid=x137830
