Willie Binnie
Marfa
January 11 – February 8, 2025
Opening: Saturday January 11, 2025 from 5-8 pm
Keijsers Koning is pleased to present Willie Binnie: Marfa, a captivating body of new paintings, works-on-paper, Polaroids, photographs, sculptures, and found objects created and gathered by the artist during his recent residency at the Chinati Foundation/Fundación Chinati in Marfa, Texas this past autumn. Known primarily as a painter, this exhibition offers a rare glimpse into the artist’s expanded practice and his exploration of the otherworldly landscapes, grappling with themes of isolation, sovereignty, beauty, and transformation.
Marfa, with its panoramic skies and sweeping vistas of the Chihuahuan desert, provides a striking backdrop for Binnie’s work–a Texas-native who now resides in the hardwood forests rural New England. Known for its mystical aura, Marfa has become a site that lays bare the intersection between nature, culture, art, and politics. The landscape is unforgiving yet filled with subtle, fleeting moments of grace, a duality that Binnie captures with both reverence and intensity. While the majesty of the desert is often mistaken as a grandeur of emptiness, Binnie reaffirms the richness of the multigenerational communities, ecological diversity, and the cultural and historical complexities and paradoxes that exist in far west Texas.
The desert, often described in extremes and dualities–life and death, light and dark, hope and despair, beauty and emptiness–becomes more than just an aesthetic reaction as Binnie explores the metaphysics of the borderland. Barren yet constant reminders of the one’s geopolitical locus: often in the shadow of a floating Homeland Security blimp and Border Patrol SUVs. The tensions and energy between artistic euphoria, art tourism, the local community, and larger national conversations of border politics creates a maelstrom of conflicting and complicated inspiration.
Across a variety of media, Binnie documents his journey through this landscape. This will be the first time that Binnie will be showing his Polaroids, a practice that has been a central yet private facet of his work. The photographs are a unique experience as they capture moments of transience of the desert frozen in time. The drawings offer a more meditative exploration of form, guiding the narrative between a micro and macro lens from the hyperlocal and larger geopolitical tensions. The paintings are bold markings that give the impression of blocking out the light that feels like it is emanating from within the canvas, both a void and a radiating source of energy. This exhibition captures both the fragility and the resilience of life, with everything in it made or started during Binnie’s two-month time in residence.
It is with great pleasure that we announce that Binnie’s painting American Bank (2023) was recently acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art for their permanent collection, with help from Anna Katherine Brodbeck (Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art) and as a gift from the Reese family.
For additional information about the artist or the work please contact the gallery at info@keijserskoning.com or 469.961.5391
