Kristin Baker

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Kristin Baker (b. 1975, Stamford, Connecticut) is a painter based in New York.

Baker holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tuft University [1], Boston (1998), and graduated from Yale’s [2] MA Painting programme (2002).

Her work has been exhibited in many prominent international galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art [3] and PS1 Contemporary Art Centre [4] in New York, the Pompidou Centre [5] in Paris, and The Royal Academy [6] in London. Her work is featured in the Saatchi Collection [7], and she is represented by Deitch Projects [8], New York.

Kristin Baker’s father is an amateur racing driver. Her paintings stem from her avid enthusiasm for, and personal involvement with, motor sport. Combining the unlikely worlds of high art and automotive speedway, Baker’s work forms a topical critique of cultural consumption and mythology. Pitting painting as a ‘coliseum’ of intense drama, Baker’s subject matter operates as climactic allegory of the pursuit of excellence. Racing’s inherent allusions of risk, skill, and spectacle provide an analogy for creative drive and artist-audience role play.

Addressing the conventional masculine genres of sport and abstract painting, Baker’s practice can be read in the context of feminist statement. Her work readily infuses orthodox notions of painting within a current frame of reference. Her fragmented canvases recall both Braque’s Cubist motion and Kandinsky’s poetic flow, while evoking instant-replay freeze-frames. Her translucent colour fields, immediate gestures and unpredictable compositions translate the spirituality of twentieth-century abstraction into the sensation of speed and the rush of adrenaline. Often using stencil and sign-painting techniques on PVC panels, Baker trades brush and canvas for the media of advertising, placing painting at the forefront of cultural commodity.