Joshua Liner Gallery

Press Release

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Crash & Burn, an exhibition of new mixed-media works by Canadian artist Ben Tour. This is Tour’s first solo show with the gallery.

Incorporating acrylic, ink, Flashe, marker, and spray paint, Tour’s suite of fifteen works on canvas and on paper meld character and mood in expressionistic portraits. The works’ exclusively female subjects serve as cathartic vehicles for the artist’s own emotions. Not so much depicted as suggested, these figures sit deep within a frenetic atmosphere of cutting lines and pools of blue or other dark hues, with splashes of bright color like outbursts of pent-up feeling.

In Crush, a large work on canvas, a reclining female figure is bathed in gauzy washes of blue and violet, suggesting both moonlight and ennui. Emotional turmoil below the surface breaks forth in fiery flashes of red hair and abstracted flowers that also register as distant fireworks. Shroud, a second, even darker work on canvas, depicts multiple perspectives of a shadowy figure combined with the more explicit narrative element of a telephone (a ‘noir’ish, pulp-fiction attitude is present here and elsewhere in the show).

Tour’s works on paper flip this energy into high-contrast sketches of dark figures against fields of white. The jagged lines, ink washes, and liquid drips of bright paint in Cold 1 and Grey 4, for instance, economically capture the essence of each character, and call to mind the wheatpastings of Swoon, Banksy’s stencils, and other contemporary street-art practices. Tour’s sharp lines, swaths of color, intimate angles, and cryptic letter stencils scattered over the works all convey a sense that the artist not only draws inspiration from the lives of strangers he observes but also manifests his own personal experiences. Tour uses the dynamics of creation and catharsis to exploit an immediate voyeuristic bond with each subject.

Born in 1977 in Toronto, Ben Tour lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia. Solo exhibitions of his work include: Electric Orphans, Meta Gallery, Toronto (2009); Underbelly, Fifty24 Gallery, San Francisco (2008); and Secrets Travel, BLK/MRKT Gallery, Los Angeles (2007). Tour has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including: All In Together Now, Together Gallery, Portland, OR (2008); F.A.M.E. Collective, Art Basel Miami Beach (2007); Brave Art Vancouver, Ayden Gallery, Vancouver, and Episoden Und Fragmente, Filter Gallery, Hamburg, Germany (2006).

Artist
Ben Tour

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