Video Tour: 'Done Being Cool'

'Done Being Cool' by Benjamin Terry
November 16 – December 21, 2024

Galleri Urbane is pleased to present Done Being Cool, a solo exhibition of new work by painter Benjamin Terry. As the title suggests, the exhibition centers around a rift, a shift, an evolution. What has come before provides a foundation, but the approach has shifted. This is, according to the artist, “not a midlife crisis show, but an anti-midlife crisis show.” Its subtle repositioning represents, Terry says, “me meditating on getting older.”
For more than a decade, the artist has worked with plywood surfaces, but the language of construction has altered. What he may have built as “haphazard, clunky constructions”—raw expressions of material, rough-hewn and almost clumsy—have become more refined and polished. “There’s a lot of construction going on, but it’s buttoned up,” Terry says. Jagged edges have become smooth undulations and undergone an attitude adjustment. Craftsmanship has come to the fore. “It’s about me resisting the urge to revert to things that I used to do when I was younger. Embracing my age and knowledge, rather than longing for some notion of what was once cool.”
“Before I was really into [the surface] getting messed up along the way. I would clamp painted wood while it was still wet,” Terry says. “I was into distressing [the work] while I was making it. Now I’m trying to preserve. There’s this process of keeping everything clean and tidy.”
Alongside runs a love for the godfathers and godmothers of Abstract Expressionism, Terry says, and a relish for “pushing wet paint into wet paint.” While previously, the work’s “soul” would develop through surfaces that bore the mark of the clamp, the scars from the jigsaw, now the artist revels in a new painterly abstraction, a traditional, gestural handling of the medium to better “maintain the integrity of the initial moment of a painting”—more soigné and finessed—albeit filtered through the language of construction.
As a result, a new temporality emerges, along with the outlines of a new stewardship. What happens on the other side of “cool”? As the artist offers, “I have to be more patient.”