Andie Dinkin
Beatrice's Puppet Show
Artist Reception: September 6th 6-8 PM
September 6th - October 4th, 2023
Andie Dinkin has a long-standing affection for the work of Florine Stettheimer. And, in turn, she shares an appreciation for the Surrealist flourishes her art hero Stettheimer came to embrace as she forged a new style away from more conservative European traditions. In Dinkin’s medley we also find Bosch and Kubrick, some stray 20th century socialites and, yes, a sprinkling of Man Ray, Magritte, a little Dali.
“Beatrice’s Puppet Show” is half gallery’s second exhibition with Dinkin following our May 2023 presentation “My Face for the World to See” at our Los Angeles location. The palette here has diversified and the compositions lean heavier towards the theatrical. The way Cecily Brown borrow from Renaissance tapestries to frame the action in her paintings, Dinkin can achieve by the addition of stage curtains. The show title itself “Beatrice’s Puppet Show” is almost like a free word association for Calder’s Circus which is fine by Dinkin. The artist thinks of Beatrice as her alter-ego, an in-studio persona she adopts while painting. If it sounds a bit like Marcel Duchamp’s Rose Sélavy it’s worth noting that he based his fictional counterpart on a friend, namely Stettheimer. “I like to play with mundane daily life and mix it with fantasy and extravagance, ghostlike figures and fragments of distorted reality, space and time,” explains Dinkin. “There’s so much mystery in life and yet I do the same thing everyday. I don’t have to conquer these mysterious moments. I can let them be as they are.“
Andie Dinkin (b. 1991, Los Angeles, California) graduated from RISD in 2014. Her work is on permanent view at Gigi’s in Hollywood and at The Carlyle in New York City. Dinkin had her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Half Gallery in June. This summer she was featured in the group show, “A Crack in Overton’s Window,” at The Ranch in Montauk.
