Book ‘Why Paintings Work’
In ‘Why Paintings Work’ Jurriaan Benschop navigates the diverse landscape of contemporary painting. He introduces the work of dozens of painters and asks: Why do these paintings work? In what ways do they speak to the…
Maria Spyraki in Athens
The palette of Maria Spyraki’s series Non-Cognitive Memory Structures (2020–24) belongs to nature as we know it from trees, stones, sky, and earth. The browns, grays, and greens, mixed with gradations of white and black, form…
Waarom een schilderij werkt
In dit boek wordt het werk van tientallen hedendaagse schilders voorgesteld. Daarbij komt steeds de vraag aan de orde: Waarom werkt dit schilderij? Op wat voor manier heeft het betekenis en kan het overtuigen? Het zijn…
The Nature of Abstraction
An exhibition in Warsaw brings together the work of Sean Scully and Stefan Gierowski. In 1945, the year that Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Stefan Gierowski, aged 20, enrolled at the art academy in Krakow,…
Tamuna Sirbiladze in Vienna
Eight years after her death, the Belvedere 21 in Vienna is organizing a retrospective of Tamuna Sirbiladze, an artist who grew up and attended the academy in Tbilisi, Georgia, and came to Vienna in 1997 for…
Aubrey Levinthal in Berlin
Subject is a paradoxical matter in painting. What is depicted may seem to be the first thing to talk about – three figures swimming, people waiting for the bus – yet it is the last thing…
Venice national pavilions
The national pavilions offer, more than the Biennale’s main exhibition ‘Foreigner Everyhwere’, the excitement of seeing a cross section of contemporary art, layered in conception and with relevance for what is happening now. The various presentations…
Venice Biennale 2024: Is It about Art or the Maker?
Visiting the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition Foreigners Everywhere means encountering many different conceptions of art making – or safer would be to just say “making.” A recurrent question while navigating the exhibition is “What am I…
CAHH opens in Valencia
Should there ever be the need for an artist who can envision the apocalypse, Mat Collishaw would probably be the right man to call. This thought came up after I saw some of his work in…
Lia Kazakou in Thessaloniki
It has been eight years since Lia Kazakou presented a solo exhibition in her hometown of Thessaloniki. While her choice of motifs has largely remained the same – fragments of clothing, the front view of a…
Podcast Helmut Middendorf
On the occasion of his exhibition in Belgium, I visited Helmut Middendorf in his studio in Athens. You can listen to the conversation, recorded for Glean magazine, on Spotify and Apple podcast channels. That was then.…
Salt in the Wound
Salt in the Wound takes you on a journey through Europe, to meet with contemporary artists such as Mirowslaw Balka, Michael Borremans, Bridget Riley and Sejla Kameric. In a collection of essays, the author wonders how…
Edition Lara de Moor
In 2023 Lara de Moor produced a special edition, based on an earlier painting she had made: ‘Spiller.’ The edition was first presented at the group exhibition Wo man sich trifft at the Emsdettener Kunstverein in…
Press about ‘Why Paintings Work’
“He practices an ’embedded’ art criticism,” Daniel Rovers wrote in De Witte Raaf about Why Paintings Work. “He (Benschop) did the same in his previous book, Salt in the wound. Artists in Europe. (2016), but then…
Wo man sich trifft
Starting from the conception of a painting as a place to meet, different approaches can be observed in this international group exhibition. The show looks into the various ways that contemporary painters stage encounters, be it…
What we Learn from Land and Sea
On 5 August, 2023 the exhibition What We Learn from Land and Sea has opened at Cycladic Arts, an artist-run residency and exhibition space on the Greek island of Paros. The question of balancing forces, and…
Book launch & exhibition in Athens
On July 12 the book Why Paintings Work was presented at Kourd Gallery in Athens. The gallery shows currently work of 8 artists who are featured in the book. There are different threads running through the…
Marc Trujillo at West (+video)
Los Angeles based painter Marc Trujillo shows recent works in the exhibition ‘8810 Tampa Avenue’ at West in The Hague (The Netherlands). Curator Jurriaan Benschop spoke with the artist at the opening (on May 7th 2023),…
Spring Tour USA
In Spring 2023 I visit several Midwest universities for a talk about my book Why Paintings Work. The tour starts in Aiken (South Carolina), and then goes to Bloomington (Indiana), Chicago (Illinois), Fayetteville (Arkansas) and Lyon…
Martha Jungwirth in Düsseldorf
Martha Jungwirth lives in Vienna but part of the year she spend on the Cycladic Islands in Greece, such as Paros or Serifos. Impressions of the landscape, the architecture, the vegetation end up in her watercolors,…