Galerie Dantendorfer
BENKA
Painted with vulgarity
17 November – 22 December 2022
Exhibition: Painted with vulgarity
Artist: BENKA
Period: 17 November – 22 December 2022
The winter exhibition at Galerie Dantendorfer in Vienna is dedicated to the Munich-based artist BENKA. The gallery invites visitors to the opening of the exhibition Painted with vulgarity on 17 November 2022.
Through his art, BENKA aims to encourage viewers to question digitalization and the use of smartphones and artificial intelligence in our everyday lives. The artist is interested in the complex interaction between humans and machines, as well as the opportunities and dangers that accompany it.
What impact does digitalization have on our daily lives? In how many areas of our lives are we dependent on machines without even realizing it? These questions occupy the artist. A symbol of the robotization of our society in BENKA’s work is the concept of the CAPTCHA, which forms the title of each painting. A CAPTCHA is an automated sequence of numbers and/or letters designed to determine whether the user is a human or a machine. Accordingly, letters and numbers also form the basis of his works, which are completed through an intuitive, raw application of paint.
The exhibition title Painted with Vulgarity is intended to place the technique and creation process of the works at the forefront. Fully in the tradition of the abstract expressionists of the 1950s, BENKA’s painting follows no strict rules; it is not about perfection, but rather about emotion and spontaneity. Paint is applied intuitively using brushes, spray cans, hands, or spatulas. He seeks to create “a human painting,” “as opposed to smooth, perfect, clean painting, the way a machine might paint.” This human-made quality should remain visible—seemingly vulgar in its application of paint, yet elegant in its overall appearance.
New to the exhibition are the small-format works, which are fragments of large canvases. They are the remnants of paintings destroyed by the artist: “It’s as if I took out the most beautiful part, like a surgeon.” From a work he finds unsatisfactory, he cuts out the essence—“a piece of emotion,” as he calls it—and elevates it into a self-contained artwork.
Text: Selin Stütz
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