The artwork features a striking, stylized portrait with a bold, graphic composition. The predominant colors are black, white, and red, creating a high-contrast visual impact. The subject's face is rendered in a simplified, almost cartoonish manner, with exaggerated features like a prominent red mouth and a single, piercing eye. The overall style and technique suggest a Pop Art influence, characterized by the use of bright, flat colors and a focus on recognizable, iconic imagery. The piece appears to be a playful, yet thought-provoking commentary on the nature of human identity and perception. ...
Combining photography, painting and drawing, Will Benedict creates works that test the limits of an art form, disrupting the distinction between the image and the frame, painting and reproduction. Through the processes of deconstruction, hybridisation and recomposition, the artist mystifies the boundaries and disorients his audiences, exploring notions of inequality, consumerism, gig-economy, a sense of collective alienation and parallel universes. The ambivalence of the subject of his work is continued through the merge of media and play on the audience’s senses. Through the use of journalistic methods and footage found on Youtube, magazines and TV, Benedict explores the relationship between art, commercial production and advertising and social media. A powerful commentary on the social, political and economic underpinnings of contemporaneity, Benedict’s practice is at once humorous and tragic, piercing through the fabrics of reality. ...
Balice Hertling was founded in 2007 by Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling. Balice Hertling has hosted the debut solo shows of many artists like Camille Blatrix, Xinyi Cheng and Isabelle Cornaro—all of whom have gone on to earn widespread recognition. From 2012 to 2016, gallery founders Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling operated a project space in Manhattan. Returning to France in 2017, they relocated the main gallery to Paris’ Marais district and transformed the former Belleville location into a space for curated projects and shows by younger artists. Indeed, many artists represented by the gallery exemplify unique subcommunities of the emergent art world. This breadth of representation also translates to a breadth of medium, as the gallery represents painters as well as artists working in mixed media such as film, performance and sculptural objects. The gallery also represents artists whose careers are more established : British conceptual artist Stephen Willats, Syrian-born painter and sculptor Simone Fattal, and Italian artist Enzo Cucchi. In its programming and practices, Balice Hertling constantly works toward creating a more diverse and equitable art landscape. In this spirit, the gallery is proud to represent the Estate of Behjat Sadr, who was the first woman artist to be recognized as a modern master in Iran. As a result of the pandemic, the gallery co-founded « Palai » in the summer of 2021, a yearly exhibition hosting a small group of galleries from around the world, in historic locations in Lecce, a city in Italy's Puglia region. Palai is neither a curated exhibition nor a fair, it is thought to be a version of a residency, a collegial collaboration, where artists, galleries, and friends of the art world come together. In 2021 Balice Hertling relocated and brought closer both spaces in the Marais with a new main space inaugurated by a Ser Serpas scultpure solo show, and a new showroom and project space on rue de Montmorency. ...
