David Krut Projects is excited to announce a new acquisition of prints by British painter Boo Ritson. Ritson has exhibited widely in a number of cities including London, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Amsterdam and her work is in private collections in London, Moscow and New York. Trained at the Royal College of Art as a sculptor, Ritson decided instead to paint, though not necessarily to make paintings. Her distinctive process involves conceiving a character, costuming her sitter and coating their face, body and clothes with dazzling, sticky household paint. The sitter is then documented photographically. Through this process Ritson’s fictional portraits become a double masquerade: her subjects painted in disguise, and the documentary image a surrogate representation of the tangible painterly, sculptural and performative qualities of the work. According to the artist, it is important that the portraits are painted on to live people, that the faces depicted in the photograph live and breathe, though with a different consciousness to the actual sitter.
Most of Ritson’s portraits are in fact inspired by stereotypes from American film, but in this series of digital prints Ritson effects an unexpected and somewhat whimsical departure from cops, hookers and housewives. In the prints she gives life to some of America’s best-loved junk food classics: hotdogs swathed in tomato-red and mustard-yellow paint, juicy doughnuts dripping in pink and white icing, and hamburgers so convincing your mouth begins to drool. The idea for this series came from what Ritson imagined her fictional characters might like to eat. As a result, these works teasingly pay their respects to Warhol by borrowing from his pop culture vocabulary, but carry an extra punch with their vulgar layering of paint, applied so aggressively that the paint acquires a visceral quality.
We encourage you to contact David Krut Projects to schedule a viewing of these new works.
Pink, 2007
Archival inkjet print
Image size: 95.4 x 95.4 cm
Edition of 25
Black, 2007
Archival inkjet print
Image size: 95.4 x 95.4 cm
Edition of 25
Blue, 2007
Archival inkjet print
Image size: 95.4 x 95.4 cm
Edition of 25
Keywords: Boo Ritson, British Artist
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