Carole Benzaken
Past Artist In Residence
2005

Carole Benzaken is a multimedia artist specializing in surreal urban settings. Most recent shows include: Contemporary, Cool, and Collected at the Mint Museum of Art in North Carolina, and Chalcographie Contemporaine at the Musee de Louvre in Paris (2007). Recent work Rush Hour (2006) was an installation at Galeries Nathalie Obadia in Paris. Six LCD screens framed in mahogany showed a series of action shots: a woman in a dark dress travels horizontally left to right, feet first, against a gray sky. She also took part in the group show Peintures/ Paintings in Berlin that same year. She received the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2004 at the Centre Pompidou at the Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne, in Paris. Her early paintings, Tulipes and Autoroute series, bear texture and color contrast that makes the images fairly leap out at the viewer. Of note are the stained glass windows she crafted for the church at Varennes-Jarcy in France. The tulip motif inserts colorful, contemporary sensuality into the ritual space: French journalist Benjamin Cherrière likened her to Marc Chagall in his web article, “Le Vitrail Contemporain/ Modern Window,” in the 2005 edition of web magazine, Banc des Savoirs/ Bank of Memories.