With an amateur race-car driver for a father, Kristin Baker attended Formula One and other racing events as a child. Now, the New York-based artist expresses the tension and explosive energy of auto racing in her colorful, large-scale paintings. Baker treads the thin line between order and anarchy in her volatile compositions, capturing the sport's suspense in varying degrees of figuration and abstraction. One painting renders a racetrack's hairpin turn in broad, clean strokes; another arrests the airborne shards of a massive collision. The artist's style has been likened to abstract expressionism, but her more legible disaster scenes evoke futurism gone haywire.

Form and content are inseparable in Baker's oeuvre. Working with trowels or squeegees in lieu of brushes, she employs industrial materials (acrylic, PVC, Mylar, and steel) to realize her compositions. Paint is slickly layered on panels to create the illusion of depth, and immaculate, freestanding architectural structures often hold up the paintings, rendering Baker's works three-dimensional. For Surge and Shadow, her recent solo exhibition at Deitch Projects, the artist elevated a curved painting off the gallery floor with a white, steel scaffolding, echoing the bleachers of her youthful experiences. The abstract work itself, titled Flying Curve, Differential Manifold, epitomizes the fusion of glee and impending catastrophe so peculiar to a day at the racetrack.

-SK