Christopher Mir’s first solo exhibition with Benrimon Contemporary opens in New York

NEW YORK, NY.- Benrimon Contemporary announces Static Is Singing, Christopher Mir’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, which features an installation of all new paintings.

The exhibition is on view at the gallery from January 17th through February 23rd, 2013. Mir draws on imagery culled from social media, the internet, film stills and other sources to create a series of non-sequiturs that appear to be out of a strange graphic novel.

“Mir’s paintings contain elements that are often positioned within idealized landscapes in dream-like circumstances. His paintings invite us to experience a series of paradoxical relationships and unsettling juxtapositions. His figures and landscapes are drawn from specific sources yet remain anonymous; his painting style is relatively tight and refined, but his works are emotionally evocative and resonant. Mir’s narratives are equally complex and replete with provocative dichotomies such as, the mystical versus the physical, the spiritual versus the secular, and the primal versus the futuristic”.– Joanna Marsh

Christopher Mir, Cat Mountain, 2012. Acrylic and enamel on canvas over panel, 48 x 72 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Benrimon Contemporary, NY.

The title of the exhibition, Static is Singing is inspired from a song by Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel emphasizing the important role that music has played in these new works. In Death Beetle, the color palette, which evokes Halloween or Day of the Dead, along with an iconic symbol of death, could easily be an album cover. Flower Girls comes from a film still he saw long ago and although he has forgotten the name, the image fragment of two girls in flower costumes has made its way into a painting. For the viewer, there is little point in trying to create relationships to each of the works in this exhibition other than stylistically. Mir is rejecting the notion of a formalistic show and has thus decided to offer us a new, diverse body of work in his oeuvre. The result is sixteen new paintings with an energizing movement and engaging color palette.

Christopher Mir was born in 1970 in Baltimore, Maryland. He received an undergraduate degree from Marlboro College in Painting and Anthropology in 1992 and went on to achieve a MFA in Painting/Printmaking in 1997 from Boston University School for the Arts. Christopher Mir lives and works in Hamden, Connecticut.