Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging, courtesy of Deitch Projects, NY.
Kristin Baker, who was born in 1975 and graduated from the Yale MFA program in 2002, had her first solo show at Deitch in New York in 2003. While the crowds were squeezing into the gallery to see works such as Big Bang Vroom and Boom Boom No. 1, Hockenheim, Baker was outside giving people rides up and down the street in her own very fast car. The American artist is in fact fascinated by the connection between painting and car racing, particularly by the contrast between accident versus control that characterizes both pursuits. She sees the racetrack as a contemporary version of the Roman coliseum, where the spectators of all social classes converge to watch the expert drivers steer their enormously expensive cars, covered with advertising, into spectacular crashes. Like the racetrack, her painting is a study in organization versus chaos. It is also a study of how far to push extremes, and how close one can get to overstimulation without an aesthetic crash.
Baker's work can be seen in 'USA TODAY', which opens at the Royal Academy in London in October.
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