Ben Brown Fine Arts presents green light, their third solo exhibition showcasing the work of American artist Ena Swansea, at the London gallery. This is the gallery’s first solo exhibition since lockdown. The title green light implies the chance to at last put one’s foot on the gas, after being stopped and daydreaming outside of clock time, not knowing what day it is.
Swansea’s new series is representative of her decontextualised and timeless style, directing attention back to painting itself. This new selection of pieces were largely painted over the course of the past year.
Swansea – area code 2019 – 2019 
Swansea – child in the ocean – 2019 
Swansea – abandoned NASCAR racetrack, 2021 
Swansea – Central Park Pond – 2019
Based in New York, Ena paints snapshots of the city as well as natural landscapes in a timeless and decontextualised style. The exhibition will feature large-scale canvases exploring motifs and symbols that recur throughout her practice, including snow, sea and urban scenes, all bordering on abstraction and demonstrating her ingenuity with the painted surface.
Ena works from a rich archive of photographic material, and her paintings have a distinctive film-like quality. She creates an intriguing hybrid digital/traditional style – she introduces elements associated with digital art and film to more traditional painting techniques. She does this by priming her canvas with a special graphite-mixture, which acts like a movie screen, so that every change of light creates a new image. The artist initially trained at film school, and she likens her process to breaking down frames and re-working them into one image.
Capturing a sense of isolation from the past year’s lockdown, Ena’s paintings are often absent of people – they are ambiguous narratives, like fragments of moments as they flash by. The result is a body of work that explores the tension between location and dislocation, realism and dream, abstraction and representation.
Ben Brown Fine Arts is excited to welcome visitors back to the London gallery both in-person and digitally to share these mesmerising new works. The show will run from 13 May to 30 July 2021.
