January 16th, 2025
Benjamin Lima discusses his visit to the gallery and the Artist talk with Horace Ballard for the Dallas Morning News. The review of Willie Binnie's "Marfa" places the work in great corrolation to the DMA's collection of Frederic Church and the spirit of the American Landscape.
"Willie Binnie's "Marfa" at Keijsers Koning presents a view of the far West Texas town
best known as an art colony (where Binnie completed the present works in a Chinati Foundation residency), but here we see not the Chinati's pristine high-end art-world outpost,
with its exquisite Judd and Flavin installations, nor the internet-famous forced humor of the Prada Marfa installation, but of something much more still and solid: pensive, ruminative views of spray washes, ice machines, border signs, Dollar General stores and cemetery monuments.
Curator Horace Ballard pointed out an affinity with Edward Hopper in Binnie's interpretations of the dry, dusty former Army base, which seems right to me, but I also see something more spooky in the eerily grinning faces of Binnie's snowmen, balloons and bootjacks — totemic, quasi-animate figures, whose vibe is more strange and uncanny than is Hopper's metropolitan solitude." B Lima, Dallas Morning News, Jan 16, 2025 (in print on Jan 19, 2025)
