Banks Violette has made melting black drum kits and small stages; he paints horrific skulls, mournful faces, and galloping white horses too. He performs a strange kind of alchemy on the heavy metal aesthetic, so that it's not quite kitsch, and not quite willfully ugly like the original, but more entrancing and always accusatory. A star of last year's Whitney Biennial, Violette has been invited back for a solo show. I visited his studio to watch him at work.

Banks Violette's Biography and Exhibitions

1973 Born in Ithaca, New York

Lives and works in New York

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2006

Team Gallery, New York, NY

Maureen Paley, London

2005

Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

2003

LISTE, Basel, Switzerland, (under the auspices of Team Gallery)

2002

Team Gallery, New York City

2000

Team Gallery, New York City

TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS

2005

Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York, NY

2004

MW Projects, London (with Nigel Shafran)

Peres Projects, Los Angeles, CA, Penteholocaust/The Sixty-Sided Stone of the Androgyne (with Matt Greene)

2003

Team Gallery, New York, NY, An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations (1773): Slater Bradley & Banks Violette

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2006

YerbaBuenaCenter for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, Cosmic Wonder

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, Youth of Today

2005

Spruth Magers Projekte, Munich, Thank You for the Music

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY, Bridge Freezes Before Road

Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, La Beaute de l'Enfer: works on paper

P.S.1, New York, NY, Greater New York

Galerie Lisa Ruyter, Vienna, Austria, Suburbia

2004

Team Gallery, New York, NY, The Ice Age

Maureen Paley/Interim Art, London, The Black Album

Visual Arts Gallery, New York, NY, Beginning Here: 101 Ways

Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, Art and Illusion: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation

Roth Horowitz, New York, NY, Power, Corruption and Lies

alternative space, Paris, Noctambule

The WhitneyMuseum of American Art, New York, NY, The Whitney Biennial

Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY, Scream

Article Theme :-

Banks Violette: There were a series of events that took place in Norway in the early 90s within the subculture of black metal. It happened in a place that is ethnically homogenous, with an elevated average income, and where Christianity has a large function in day-to-day life.

Read Entire Article about USA Artist Banks Violette paintings and artwork at The Saatchi-Gallery http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/banks_violette.htm