Reyes | Finn to Present 'James Benjamin Franklin: Practice'
Since the completion of his MFA five years ago, Franklin has worked to challenge the material and spatial limitations of painting.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz

Reyes | Finn will present Practice, the gallery's third solo exhibition of work by Detroit-based artist James Benjamin Franklin, which will be on view from January 15th-February 26th, 2022.
Since the completion of his MFA five years ago, Franklin has worked to challenge the material and spatial limitations of painting. The artist has become known for creating vibrant, high-energy paintings anchored within hand-built, instinctively-shaped, plaster-sculpted frames. Painting with vernacular materials, the artist intricately binds found textiles such as carpets, afghans, bathroom mats, and kitchen rags, with epoxy, acrylic, rubber, sand and glitter in order to create complex, layered, sumptuous surfaces that feel equally as familiar as they do foreign. The selection of materials in order to evoke a time and place plays a key role in Franklin's process. Though some of the items are bought new, many come from the artist's own home or are otherwise sourced from thrift stores in Detroit, imbuing the artworks with a sense of local history and personal memory. The resulting paintings invite a meditative look at the textures, colors, and forms as they stir up subjective and sensorial associations.Presenting nine new paintings measuring over six feet tall, the exhibition marks a major progression in the artist's practice as he reveals his most detailed and compositionally complex works to date. The exhibition's title takes into consideration Franklin's work as a skilled profession as well as an ongoing experience of learning, thereby offering the opportunity to contemplate this presentation in both of these contexts.
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