From curious types and those mildly interested in sprucing up their walls to lifelong art lovers looking to realize their personal vision of a finely curated, art-filled residence, finding the right artwork for one’s home can be quite the challenge.
Traditionally, when it comes to incorporating fine art into interior design, most homeowners start with the most conventional of all art forms, paintings. But even once the medium is settled on, how does one go about finding the right painting, or artist, for their home?

Some merely keep an eye out for whatever strikes their fancy, while others enlist the aid of professionals like Suzanne Lovell, CEO of Suzanne Lovell Inc., a Chicago-based architectural interior design firm specializing in luxury residential projects.

“Always buy what you love, what moves you. The more you acquire as an art collector, the more that you learn about yourself and what you prefer,” Ms. Lovell said. “There are rules when it comes to paintings. A good discussion around value means review of public and private past sales, and look at the career of the artist, where have they exhibited and what collections are they in. What’s next for them?”

Among traditional collectors, some are drawn to acquiring paintings based on perceived value as an investment opportunity, but “you should first and foremost be visually drawn to a piece you’ll be living with before considering it as a purchase for your home,” explained Los Angeles-based interior designer Jamie Bush. “If a work is valuable yet you don’t care for it much, then it’s an odd thing to bring into your home. That said, I feel to have the privilege to be able to acquire art as an investment is something, given the opportunity, that one should definitely do. To be able to enjoy something that is exciting, beautiful, controversial, seductive or monumental in your home—instead of stocks, for example—is one of the great joys of life.”

In speaking with new clients, Ms. Lovell encourages them to select paintings “to build a story based upon historical precedent, teacher/student, contemporaneous works, or similar subject matter,” noting how “that’s the fun and passion behind collecting with an idea of the story that you would like to tell and experience as it unfolds, and meanders with each new find/acquisition.”

Firms like Mr. Bush’s can sometimes help. “During this process, we do a lot of precedent analysis, reviewing past auction records, condition reports, market fluctuations—getting all the pertinent information together to help them make an informed decision helps put the client in the best position to decide if the purchase is right for them,” Mr. Bush said.

Here are four artists and painters to keep an eye out for:

Kara Walker (b. 1969) is a contemporary African-American artist whose work explores race, stereotypes and gender throughout American history. She has gained international recognition for her cut-paper silhouettes depicting complex historical narratives, and has used drawing, painting and sculpture to expose the ongoing psychological effects of the legacy of slavery.

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“Walker’s use of the silhouette attracts the viewer’s attention in crisp black and white, while the depiction commands contemplation and invokes an awareness of history and what that story means today,” Ms. Lovell said.

When suggesting Ms. Walker and other similar artists to clients, Ms. Lovell encourages them to “be brave, be bold and collect the work of the artists whose messages you believe deserve a platform.”

The Copenhagen-based Astrid Krogh (b. 1968) is known for combining traditional techniques with innovative materials to produce a kaleidoscopic assortment of light installations, textiles and gilded surfaces. Many of the artist’s best-known works explore the nuances of sensory experience, triggering emotion through light, color, and touch. Her work can be spotted at the artistically-themed 21C Museums, as well as Design Miami Basel, Longchamp, PAD London, and other international, public sites.

Meadow // Astrid Krogh

“Living with art can alter your experience of the everyday, as it does for our clients for whom we installed a wall piece by Krogh in the entrance to their Manhattan pied-à-terre,” Ms. Lovell said. “Krogh’s ‘painting with light’ is ever changing, it is interesting when off and on, and it defines the space at night that is visible from the dining and living areas.”

A central figure among contemporary Native American artists, Ramona Sakiestewa (b. 1948) was born of Hopi ancestry and raised in the American Southwest. The versatile Sakiestewa has impressed the art world by evolving and adapting ancient Pueblo techniques, and is renowned for her tapestries, works on paper, public art and architectural installations.

Ramona Sakiestewa Light Echo 5, 2019 silver-leafed acrylic paint 24 x 24 x 2.25 in. TAI Modern

In recent years, the artist has been focusing on what she terms “constructions,” for which she first deconstructs earlier prints, then paints and draws on additional pieces of fabrics and papers, and finally manipulates the palette of images, patterns and surfaces into dimensional constructions. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation commissioned Sakiestewa to weave 13 tapestries from the architect’s drawings, and she has served as a design consultant working to build the National Mall facility of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“Ramona Sakiestewa is an incredibly accomplished artist and her work ranges greatly in medium and style. Her knowledge of technique comes through in everything she does,” said Amy Weber, director of communications for TAI Modern, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based fine arts gallery that has worked with the artist numerous times. “The color and modern feel of much of her work is a stunning addition to any collection.”

The artist’s bold tapestries, which serve as an elegant platform for her culture’s ritual imagery, work well as a striking focal point when displayed on a large wall in a foyer or sitting room.

Erik Benson Still Life (Eating Tigers), 2017 acrylic on canvas over panel 20 x 16 in. TAI Modern

The Minneapolis-based artist Erik Benson (b. 1974) has made a mark on the contemporary art world by using a unique process in which he pours acrylic paint onto sheets of glass, allows the material to become solid and elastic, and then cuts it into shapes and removes by peeling. These pieces are then collaged onto canvas to build up an image, a process that echoes the built environment of urban life, thus investigating the physical and psychological infrastructure of the man-made landscape.

Mr. Benson’s works, which have been widely displayed in the U.S. and Europe, “often reminds me of a winter’s day in Brooklyn,” Ms. Weber said. “He brings out the bright cheerful colors of otherwise drab landscapes.”

Given how the artist’s paintings often feature urban fragments and spaces, his works are a particularly effective tool for city dwellers looking to add a piece that will engage and demand reflection on the outside world.

By: Suzan Sherman

I met with Erik Benson in his DUMBO studio this past summer, when he was a resident artist in the 2009 Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program. Down the hall from NYFA’s offices, Benson’s studio offered sweeping views of the Brooklyn Bridge, the East River, and beyond it to the urban landscape often portrayed in his paintings. Benson and I sat together in front of one of his works-in-progress, a painting of a half-built house. Earlier in the day, he had rendered the small light brown flecks in its particle board walls. One of the hallmarks of Benson’s work is his application of acrylic paint, which he spreads in thin sheets on a palette to dry before cutting it into shapes. Literally building up the surface of the canvas bit by bit, Benson mirrors the labored, brick-by-brick construction of the buildings, playgrounds, and construction sites which are the subject matter of his work.

Suzan Sherman: I’ve never seen any houses in your work before. This looks like it could be out in the suburbs of New Jersey somewhere.

Erik Benson: I’ve actually done one other piece about the suburbs—a housing development in the Midwest. My parent built their house so that it looks like everyone else’s on their street, and I got interested in that idea of symmetry. No one wanted to have their own style—no one wanted to stick out. The painting is about uniformity, but I also tried to update it to reflect the recession and all of the foreclosures going on. I’m also attracted to building materials—I’m sort of deconstructing these buildings by showing the cheapness of how they’re made.

SS: I know your paintings are intended as a critique, but they always end up being so beautiful.

EB: I definitely get seduced by them too. It’s important to me that they look good. It’s just that this painting has so far to go. I have all these ideas about plant growth coming up  through these tractors, little speckles of debris throughout this piece. And there’s going to be a basketball hoop. I have a photo of a hoop that I took in Bed-Stuy about three weeks ago; it was a basketball hoop from the suburbs that you get for your driveway. Somebody took the hoop and tied it to a light post with a cord and wire. And it was incredible, it was so beautiful, and somehow it just needs to be in this painting.

SS: Do you make drawings ahead of time?

EB: Yeah, I do sketches. Just thumbnails to get a sense of the composition. And then I go from there. The photographs I take work as sketches as well. I walk around with a point-and-shoot camera, and if I see something that’s interesting I snap a picture of it. Like that painting [pointing to Sleepon the wall] is about gentrification. There are all these high-rise buildings that have gone up near Bushwick. It was an old, industrial neighborhood that’s now been built up with “beautiful” glass-box houses.

SS: You were born in Detroit, went to school in the Midwest and Providence, but the work you’re doing now is so New York. It feels like you’re totally, literally immersed in your subject matter.

EB: Yes, I am. But I don’t know if that’s such a good thing.

SS: Why?

EB: Perhaps it’s too specific, while at the same time it is speaking to my experience. But maybe it might be a little difficult to relate to if you don’t live here. I think someone from the Midwest will react totally different to my painting. It’s something I’ve really been thinking about a lot lately.

SS: New York is such a tourist attraction, so it’s very conscious of itself in a way that maybe, say, Minneapolis wouldn’t be. We’re inundated with images of New York on TV and in movies; it’d become romanticized—even the grit is romanticized. The colors that you use in your work, like in this painting—you’re not replicating natural light, are you?

EB: Trying to get the color of windows at night is such a specific thing. Those are actually the colors that I was trying to get. It took me two months. There’s a specific way to do it because it’s so translucent, and I think the tendency for most painters is to make something really opaque. I did the entire structure of the building in an off-white yellowish. And for all the windows I used translucent gels of acrylic paint, and peeled them off and kept building up the layers—layer after layer after layer.

SS: Like stained glass.

EB: Yeah, exactly. I was really happy with how it turned out. When you get an idea like that you just go for it, but then it always has to change. The painters I like the most are the ones who are able to not let their ideas remain fixed, and just keep letting whatever is happening in a painting happen.

My favorite artist is Robert Gober because he’s just so smart about how he does his work. There’s a sort of formula to it, but he breaks his own rules all the time too. I think that he listens to himself. When I talk to other painters about their work, much of the time it ends up feeling more like shop talk—you always end up involved in a conversation that’s like, ‘Oh, well they did this to do that,’ or, ‘It was done this way.’

In school I really loved Lari Pittman. I thought that his paintings were so technically virtuosic. I had no idea how he did it—the skill level of his craft was really impressive to me. But now I look at a lot of landscape painting—that’s what moves me right now. The 18th-century painter Caspar David Friedrich is probably my biggest influence in terms of what I’m working on now. And then there’s the Hudson River School—Frederick Church, Thomas Cole—their work is about landscape, but it’s also about the sublime, and I like that notion in a contemporary context.

SS: All of their landscape work is incredibly romanticized, but then when I look at your work I don’t think of it as being about social criticism per se either, at least not on the immediate surface.

EB: I think I romanticize some things a bit, but I think you have to. How could you not? Something like sneakers hanging from power lines. Just seeing that is romantic, even though what it means is not romantic at all.

SS: How long have you lived in New York?

EB: Since ’96. Then I went to grad school for two years, and afterward I came back.

SS: Because it seems like if you’d been born and raised here, maybe you wouldn’t be making paintings like this.

EB: Yeah, I think that’s probably true. I did a lecture a few weeks ago, and went back and looked at my work from undergrad. It was crazy, because the paintings that I was doing then are so different from what I’m doing now. But they had the rudimentary structure of what I’m doing today, maybe less successfully, but it was definitely there.

SS: I went to that lecture, and I was really taken by what you said about how you dreaded the idea of putting buildings into your paintings, and how you came at doing it sideways.

EB: In grad school everyone is fighting to have a theory and be really smart, and I was too—not through painting heroic architecture but by painting playgrounds and construction sites. I really liked that idea, but in reality I was really just preparing myself to paint buildings. And that’s good—it was a good way to move into it.

SS: It makes you feel like your decisions make sense.

EB: Definitely. And I think you grow in a spiral too, and you’re always coming back to where you used to be. But you’re able to see where you are with a different level of knowledge that you’ve attained by taking the path all the way around. Also, the funny thing about looking back at my work is seeing my strictness in wanting to be a flat painter—all my flat, shape-based language, and now I’m getting back into brush strokes. I see these paintings going in a really weird direction, and I feel good about it.

SS: When did you start cutting up the dried paint and laying the shapes directly onto the canvas?

EB: Grad school. I had to stop using oil paint in grad school because I had an allergic reaction to it—I just broke out in hives. The doctor in the hospital said that I probably had enough toxins in my body from oil paint that I should stop using it. I was totally devastated. The idea of using acrylic paint just made me nauseous. I was miserable. But what ended up happening was that I adapted my subject matter to the paint, because there’s such a plasticity to acrylic—I mean, it is plastic—and I found myself becoming attracted to things that were plastic, like orange traffic cones. And then I had these pieces of plastic on my studio floor, and I accidentally spilled paint on it and just let it dry one night. When I came back the next day, it was hard and I peeled it off. The dried acrylic was like Colorforms. And I really got into this idea of Colorforms—that you could move around these shapes. That was my idea for the structure of a painting that would be cool, and it just kept evolving. That was one accident that turned into a good idea.

SS: When you said before that you made this playground in an afternoon [pointing to the painting,The Commons], it seems to me that it would take a week to construct something so complex. You’re not using a stencil?

EB: I cut out the dried acrylic with an X-Acto knife, like the two strips that are here.

SS: It seems so delicate to me.

EB: It’s actually really malleable. It’s just plastic; you have to be careful not to let it fold onto itself. The bottom side has a little bit of tackiness to it, and that helps secure it.

SS: One thing that I was just thinking about when you were talking about Colorforms, and in looking at this painting [Sleep] where the windows just glow, is Lite-Brite, another childhood game. I especially loved using Lite-Brite without the stencils.

EB: Yes, you used the black sheets to make whatever you wanted. Now I won’t be able to think about anything else for the next five days.

SS: With all this talk of childhood, I was curious about the kinds of things that you liked to draw as a child.

EB: I used to have drawing books where I drew shapes step by step, and by the end of eight or nine pages I’d have a buffalo. My brother and I were really into that. We’d make these little drawings in color pencil, though mostly we used Magic Markers. We’d shop them around town and sell them to the neighbors for a quarter each.

SS: Did people buy them?

EB: Yes, and that’s what was so crazy about it. I remember coming back home with like ten bucks, and my mom asked, ‘Where did you get that?’ I think I started drawing just to decorate my walls a bit. I remember one Saturday afternoon I was really bored, and it was rainy out. I lived in a really small town in central Minnesota, and I started drawing superheroes on one piece of paper, and then I just kept going, and pretty soon I just drew every superhero I could think of. Pretty soon I had all these pages of superheroes in my room, and it was kind of this impulse to archive things. I remember it being important at the time. I went to an arts high school, and I wanted to learn to draw really well so I convinced my mom to give me $200 for figure drawing classes that met once a week every six or seven weeks. And we drew the same pose every time. I still have that drawing. It’s not very good. It changed so much over the course of several weeks, and I remember taking it home and my mom said, ‘I paid 200 dollars for this?’ But the class forced me to look at something closely. I still think about that a lot—that was a good learning experience.

SS: So when you were young, you obviously didn’t envision yourself as becoming an artist.

EB: I came from a very predictable Midwestern background. My parents both worked the same hours, and that’s what I thought I’d do. Not that art isn’t a job, but it was always looked upon as a hobby. You couldn’t have a career in that. And if you did have a career, you were sort of chastised or rebuffed. My dad sprayed crops for a fertilizer company and my mom was a secretary at that same company. I had a job bean-weeding in the summertime for $50 a day when I was 14, so I always just assumed I’d have a job, though I thought I’d go to medical school at one point. I thought I’d be a skateboarder for a little while, too. But even in grad school I never thought that this would actually work out in terms of my making a living. After grad school I came back to New York and got a job as an art handler. I still do art-handling, but a lot less than I used to. For a while I was doing it five days a week and that was just a nightmare. It’s almost impossible to have a career as an artist if you work full-time. I know so many people that try. I respect the effort, but at some point you just need to dig your heels in and say, I’m going to eat ramen noodles and make this work. And get good. And get good fast. And a lot of the time it doesn’t matter—it’s not about you being good; it’s about being lucky. Luck has a huge amount to do with it. I know lots of really good people that haven’t sold a painting. I’ve been really,
really fortunate.

Erik Benson makes paintings of urban landscapes informed by the Everyday. He received his M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001, and his B.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1996. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001, and was a recipient of a NYFA Fellowship in Painting in 2009, as well as a resident of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program in the same year. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Erik Benson makes paintings that are informed by fragments of urban landscape and culture that are found in the everyday. He is particularly attracted to imagery that is ubiquitous within an urban architectonic setting, in which elements of plasticity and temporality are depicted in a suspended state of in-betweeness. It is his intention that these elements incorporate a resonance of a special psycho-geography of place and placelesness that conveys the infrastructure (physically, psychologically, and conceptually) of an urban landscape. An urban sampling of fragment and space, that attempts to express something new about the spaces we inhabit.

Benson is interested in making painting in an analog sense. He builds his paintings by pouring acrylic paint onto sheets of glass. Once the shapes have solidified and acquired elasticity, they are peeled off and collaged into larger compositions. These collaged constructions create a certain mimetic relationship between the images depicted and the processes in which they are made; (primarily notions of production, pre-fabrication, modularity and design.) Similar visual examples and references are toys such as Legos and Colorforms. These applications allow the collaged imagery to portray an analog cartography of constructed spaces and make mark making a reflexive gesture of abstraction by physically controlling how the images in the paintings are built and deleted.

In his current work, he is interested in how space is inhabited. Most of these spaces tend to mimic the processes that go into the making of the work, and highlight a certain dislocation that he finds in the contemporary landscape. Although there are no people in the work there is an acute presence, which portrays the psycho-cartography of our daily lives, why we live where we live, the choices we make, where we go and what we see, and how we move through the day.

Exploring the intersection of utopian architecture into our culture, Finesilver Gallery has brought together two artists that focus on landscape, isolation, and community.

On the first floor, Chicago artist Angelina Gualdoni presents Fringe City, six paintings that depict a somewhat desolate landscape. While she investigates various states of ruin, Gualdoni also presents an optimistic viewpoint. Her isolated representations of city, suburban, and country structures are not just records of a declining society, they are imbued with a hopeful outlook for renewed generative life. Gualdoni’s small watercolors and gouaches on paper and her large canvases are each a portrait study of a collapsing and dilapidated form that recalls and echoes the memories of past inhabitants. Particularly nostalgic is New Heaven, Taos, New Mexico, (2003), wherein a rickety log cabin with a torn American flag placed in the doorway somehow appears heroic among the forest of trees in which it stands. The cabin, positioned in the right foreground of the canvas, is surrounded by greenery while the background blazes with what appears to be the rays of the breaking sun. Alternately, the glowing pinks and yellows may portend an approaching fire that will consume this frail construction, creating uncertainty as to whether the scene is one of hard-fought survival or imminent destruction.

In Everything Remains to be Done(2003) Gualdoni once again ambiguously plays with the possibilities of the past and the future. Here she depicts a suburban development with sidewalks and driveways traversing a patch of green and leading to a row of identical homes with gaping mouths for garages. At the end of the row stands the framework for two additional buildings. Are they about to be completed, is the project abandoned, or are they in the midst of being torn down? Despite the questions that Gualdoni raises, stillness and quietness suffuse this image along with several others in the exhibition, reflecting the time of day the artists chooses to depict — often dusk or dawn.

With most of the paintings shown, it is impossible to tell if the sites have grown from the artist’s imagination or if they are depictions of real places. But one image does reflect an actual locale and event. In the diptych, Two Inevitables (for Corbusier) I and II(2003), the point of reference appears to be the recent demolition of America’s most notorious low income public housing project, Cabrini Greenin Chicago. These tenements were torn down this year to make way for an innovative new housing development — town homes and condominiums that integrate upper middle class residents with government-subsidized neighbors. In this work, the artist renders the destruction as if in slow motion — the swaying collapse of the buildings suggests pounded-down clay. Outlines of newer, sleeker, highrises are sketchily portrayed in the background, allowing for washes of gold and orange to shine through, suggesting the breaking of dawn with the rising sun — a metaphor for community renewal.

Clearly resonating with Gualdoni’s work, New York artist Erik Benson’s exhibition Perfect Memorybrings together eight canvases in the upstairs gallery that also address architecture and urban atmosphere. In his unconventional paintings, Benson plays with perceptions of depth and flatness by building up layers of paint that he initially poured onto glass. He then allows the paint to dry before he cuts it into the desired patterns, removes it and finally meticulously applies, or collages the pieces onto canvas. This process can be deceptive, as it is not always easy to discern where he builds up the paint, scrapes it away, or applies the cut out forms. The results are low reliefs with a seamless background and obvious manipulations in the foreground. Contrasting with the opaque ground of the canvas which he has built up, the colorful translucent blocks and strips of color that Benson applies are reminiscent of automobile detailing strips or press-on Colorforms. This way of working echoes the precise layering of materials that architects and construction workers use to create various buildings. Bringing to life the structures of amusement parks, playgrounds, buildings, bridges, and their surrounding urban environment, Benson reduces the human elements into tactile blurs of movement that are suggestive of snapshots with long exposures, which he juxtaposes with the static, high contrast elements of architectural forms. In fact, humanity seems stripped away in each painting, where the scene is frozen in the moment before the city wakes up and becomes a frenzied metropolis.

All the paintings seem to hover in this time of early morning exceptLong Way from Home (2003). Here the windows of multiple high rises are positioned against a black background behind the streaking remnants of car lights on the expressway, and are suffused with glowing oranges and reds, again providing a hint of the presence of people. The colors and energy Benson imbues his paintings with give breath to what would normally be a cold structure of concrete and steel beams. Instead, each building becomes a personification — without sentimentality — that speaks to the character of a thriving city. In National Anthems (2003) the all-white buildings fade into the background and the focus is on the trees lining a pedestrian bridge. Slightly off-center, attached to the structure of the walkway, is an American flag (the flag in this work is a coincidental, but nice tie to the Gualdoni’s piece referenced above). Benson explores the anonymity of what is distinctly an American urban environment — modern buildings and vistas along with a style of playgrounds and amusement parks that are unique to, and ubiquitous in, the United States. With the work This is Tomorrow (2003), this point is especially apparent — while many cities adopt a distinctive architectural vocabulary, playgrounds are always the same. Benson repeatedly layers the arching forms of a jungle gym creating a brown, red, and orange maze of forms densely built up on the surface that stand out starkly from the white buildings modeled in the background. Empty of playing children, this painting causes reflection on how easy it is to be subsumed into city life. Mediating on these themes, Benson renders the primary accouterments to life in a modern city — housing, avenues of transportation, and areas to play or break free from the stresses of living in an urban atmosphere.

Erik Benson’s exquisite show “Detouring” reassembled and animated urban blight. With layered slivers and strips of collaged acrylic paint, Benson creates vistas of his Bushwick, Brooklyn, neighborhood. His recent works, show here, tend to be grimier than past efforts and somewhat atmospheric as a result of the artist’s direct painting on canvas (whether by hand or sprayer). Yet while displaying wear on the surfaces, the paintings also retain the graphic precision of the previous work.

These pieces revealed laborious design and painterly dissolution. In Americana (2011), a construction-stalled building is pushed backward in a scrim of gray haze, calling attention to a delicate London Plane tree in the foreground, a recurring motif throughout the exhibition. Fences are depicted in these works as shriveled grids with a plastic flaccidness and deflated rigidity, as can be seen in London Plane (2011). Deluge (2011) is an all-consuming network of enmeshed lines that holds the viewer just on the outside of the picture’s fringes.

In this exhibition, Benson pushed the limits of his collaged-paint technique. Unabashedly exploiting the plastic materiality of acrylic paint, Benson also collaged paper and paint onto canvas, in works like Overgrowth (Billboard)(2011), and Post No Bills (2011), and then removed sections of paper to replicate the effect of palimpsests on billboards and construction fences. These paintings express a compelling tension in the way they disrupt the strictly ordered modernist structures in the scenes and show how natural conditions of light can eclipse architecture and human-built environments.

Erik Benson’s dystopian and romantic artwork of layered acrylic on canvas has been labeled as both descriptive of the urban beauty and reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints.  Benson’s stark graphic interpretations of urban reality are formulated on glass tables, where he spreads thin layers of acrylic paint, allows the paint to dry, then cuts out shapes with an X-Acto knife.  He then composes his images in a collage-style, layering the shapes into arresting portrayals of urban landscapes.  Benson’s art focuses on the everyday scenery of metropolitan life, albeit one that is void of humanity.  Though he is careful to take into account forms of the natural world as part of his overall picture, the artist locks in on textures drawn from simple high rise structures, grimly graffitied buildings or other identifiable aspects commonly found in modern cities.

The New Yorker has described Benson’s style as one “In which old-fashioned color-field abstraction merges with dystopic, Pop-ish interest in the junky emptiness of highway on-ramps, strip malls and corporate offices…The composition manage to express humor, loathing and curiosity all at once.”

Eight Modern will feature seven works from Benson, a Detroit-born artist who currently resides in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Erik Benson paints scenes that are quiet and still.  There are no people in his paintings, though traces of their presence are everywhere.

If ever a case could be made for seeing paintings up close, the work of Brooklyn-based painter Erik Benson is it.  There is a clarity and attention to detail in the group of Benson’s paintings on view at Eight Modern that, while possible to achieve with brushwork, cannot be properly appreciated until it is understood that he is working with an unusual application of collage.  “It looks like flat line, architectural work, until you actually see it,” Benson told Pasatiempo in an interview, “and it’s actually built and constructed.”

Built up in layers superimposed over one another, the elements that form Benson’s paintings are cut from sheets of acrylic paint and applied to the canvas piece by piece—or, given the architectural subject matter, you might say brick by brick.  “I was really attracted to doing these paintings of elements of urban landscapes that had something to do with the plasticity of painting,” he said.  “The process that I was using to make these was similar to how they actually looked and how you really see them.”

Benson paints scenes that are quiet and still.  There are no people in his paintings, though traces of their presence are everywhere.  One sense that the addition of a human subject would dramatically change a painting’s focus and, given his technique, possibly add a layer of unreality.  “When it becomes figurative, it takes on a whole different kind of framing, and I just want to stay away from that.  I have some pieces that I do that have graffiti elements, and sometimes the graffiti takes on this almost figurative characteristic.  It can become problematic, so it’s very important to keep that at bay to some extent.”

Several paintings in the exhibit—“Resse”,”Skeletons”, and “Eminent Domain” (from which the show gets its title)—depict graffiti on building walls.  While some of the graffiti imagery is applied using the collage-like technique, some is painted directly on the surface.  “I’m actually painting back into things a lot lately,” Benson said.  “It’s adding to the work quite a bit, I think.  I’ve been staining and glazing things, and I’ve been using a lot of airbrushing techniques lately, too.”

Benson works from a 4-by-8 foot glass surface, on which he applies layers of acrylic paint from which he cuts out his shapes.  “The paintings are on canvas stretched over panels,” he said.  “They usually lie flat while I’m working on them.  I’ll do an isolation coat of an area where I’m applying things.  Once it comes off the surface of the glass, it has a tactility to the backside of it.  It will want to stay where it goes without too much gluing.  I place the pieces, and they get sealed afterward.  It’s basically just a polymer emulsion, like clear acrylic paint.”

Benson works from photographs but avoids allowing too many details of geographic locations into his work.  They convey a mood or a feeling experienced in an urban landscape but are not intended to represent a specific moment or a place in time.  “The whole process, in the way they’re made into collage, happens conceptually through my photographing these things and then bringing them into paintings,” he said.  “There’s a real cut-and-paste element to it all.  I try to take archetypal buildings rather than specific ones.  There are some that are specific, but I try to play it down a little bit.  When they become too specific it becomes more like a postcard or a rendering of something.”

The precision required to depict every brick in a wall or every window in a modern high-rise condo using Benson’s cut-and-paste method doesn’t detract from the painterly quality fo his imagery.  Somehow, the atmospheric scenes of city landscapes stir up melancholy feelings, as evidenced by a painting called “Mixtape,” in which an old building sits beneath a darkening winter sky.  Adding to this sense of pensive sadness is the presence in all the paintings in “Eminent Domain” of blackened, leafless tress.  “I think there’s something really specific about that,” Benson said, “that has to do with living in an urban environment like here in New York.  Trees aren’t always the things you think about when you’re in New York.  It brings you back to the bucolic landscape.”

Benson’s imagery juxtaposes the organic, branching forms of the trees with the architecture.  There is always that presence of the man-made.  Even in the trees, we see tangled wires and plastic bags caught in the gnarled branches.  “I think part of the dynamic of the work is the ambiguity it brings up,” he said.  “That’s what I’m interested in, anyway—the quiet moments where you’re able to kind of get in and notice these things you wouldn’t normally notice.”  Benson is a skillful observer.  In the painting “Skeletons,” for instance, massive structures—incomplete buildings either in early stages of construction or in ruins—lose vividness of color with distance.  The sharpest imagery is in the foreground—a brick building marred by graffiti and a tree (Benson has depicted every branch).

What he seldom shows is the entire structure of a building.  He doesn’t so much leave it to the imagination but rather captures a way an urban scene is actually experienced firsthand.  We see the top half of a structure, as in the painting “Eminent Domain,” for instance, and the bottom half is hidden behind a wall.  “I’m always attracted to that idea.  There’s always this obstruction of something that you’re not quite seeing that’s either off the canvas or hidden by another element.”

Erik Benson’s urban landscapes have a poetic quality.

Erik Benson might qualify as a sculptor as much as a painter.  His process is one of building a painting in collaged layers of acrylic paint, much as a sculptor might build a bas-relief.  The resulting works will show at Eight Modern gallery on Delgado Street in an exhibition called “Eminent Domain,” opening today and running through June 4.

Benson’s contemporary landscape paintings “are simultaneously dystopian and romantic, exhibiting a discerning intelligence and graphic punch,” gallery registrar Meghan Ferguson writes.  “He works with acrylic paint, which he spreads in thin layers on a glass table to dry before using an X-Acto knife to cut it into shapes.  Benson peels off these decal-like pieces and collages them into the picture, building up the surface of the canvas into a low relief in a process that mirrors the constructed nature of the buildings and urban sites that he depicts.”  And the whole process began with an allergy.

“I was 24 years old and in grad school when I developed a rash and began to be very sick,” Benson told the “Journal.”  The allergist told the young artist he was allergic to oil paint, the very tool of his trade.  It hadn’t happened overnight, the doctor explained—Benson’s body had just reached its capacity for absorbing the toxicity.

“I was really unhappy and angry,” he said.  “I hated acrylic paint, and here I was being told to switch to acrylics.  I was trying desperately to work with acrylic like I did with oil and it wasn’t working at all.”  He had his studio swathed in plastic to catch the drips and dribbles of paint and Benson noticed that the various drips and dribbles would peel off the plastic.  He began experimenting with pouring the acrylic paint onto a sheet of glass and then cutting the paint into thin slices to create paintings on prepared fiberboard or canvas.  “It was one of those dumb accidents that became something bigger,” he said.

The resulting paintings a of urban ‘scapes, complete with architectural representations focused by delicate tree branches and urban details like flags and banners, have created increasing attention in the art world.  He was selected for a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and has an upcoming residency scheduled at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.  He has exhibited at, among other venues, Galerie Schuster (Frankfurt), Finesilver Gallery, Houston and San Antonio, Rare Gallery, N.Y.C., Angles Gallery, Santa Monica and Artspace, San Antonio.  His work has been written about in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America and ArtNews.  “I am interested in the mimetic [imitative] relationship between architectural subjects in the paintings and the process in which they are produced,”  Benson says.  “I’m interested I how this construction process allows in a painting vocabulary an exploration of unexamined things.”

His painting “Condo #1” depicts a colorless winter sky and a tree dropping the last of its leaves in front of a concrete and glass apartment tower with a kaleidoscopic array of windows.  The dramatic composition, flattened picture space, and almost wabi-sabi aesthetic are reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints, Ferguson noted.

The New Yorker described Benson’s style as one “in which old-fashioned color-field abstraction merges with a dystopic, Pop-ish interest in the juny emptiness of highway on-ramps, strip malls and corporate offices…His layered acrylic canvases [are] works with a jigsawlike density, a gloomy/garish palette, and a keen sense of line.  The compositions manage to express humor, loathing and curiosity all at once.”

Benson stressed that his paintings are informed by architecture and landscape found in the everyday world.  “I build my paintings using a cut-and-paste collage method to create the forms and structures in my work.  I’m interested in how this construction process allows in a painting vocabulary an exploration of unexamined things,” he said in an artist’s statement.

Benson, 38, who was born in Detroit and has described his upbringing as solidly Midwestern and middle-class.  His parents, he has said, were skeptical that he could earn a living as an artist.  He earned a bachelor’s in fine arts degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a master’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001.  He lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y.  For many years, Benson supplemented his income by working as an art handler, one who crates and ships or moves art for galleries and museums.  But it is very hard to work full-time and be an artist, he said.  Sooner or later, Benson said, every artist has to decide to “eat Ramen noodles and just go for it full time.” For him, the time of Ramen noodles paid off.

“I just turned down a big museum job for the first time in five years,” he said.  “Told them ‘Nope, I need to paint and I can afford to.’  It felt great.  Really cool.  You have to find out what’s important to you.”  Benson said with humility that luck can’t be discounted in an art career, although “sometimes, the harder you work, the luckier you get.”  Placing work in a New York Armory show was a piece of luck for him, he said, and it resulted in exhibits in Santa Fe (at Eight Modern), Spain and another New York gallery.

His latest experiments have to do with watercolor, which he said, have allowed him to “add some airiness” to his paintings.  That enhances the poetic quality critics have noticed in his work.  “Despite the desolation of the scenes he portrays, Benson’s paintings retain a remarkable vitality, energized both by his dedicated, thoughtful process and the inherent familiarity of his subject matter,” Ferguson said.  “Erik Benson finds truth and beauty in the urban blight that is often left overlooked and unexamined.”

Eric Benson’s first New York solo exhibition offers seven elegantly crafted, exquisitely designed collage paintings of an imagined contemporary American landscape. The paintings, all from 2006, depict all-too-familiar urban sprawl full of incongruously sited International Style glass skyscrapers, decaying forms that have outlived their usefulness, and ubiquitous cookie cutter housing developments on the frontier of suburbia.

Employing sharp-edged realism and a novel technique of collage-as-painting, these intensely crafted, low-relief images have affinities with Kara Walker’s cutout silhouettes as well as anime. Benson painstakingly cuts a wide range of shapes, down to the smallest details, from prepared dried skeins of acrylic paint. He then attaches the decal-like pieces in layers to the surface of the canvas. In Anniversary, brightly colored forms, applied in crisp modular units, represent an apartment complex under construction at the edge of a city. Benson achieves a remarkable verisimilitude when he chooses colors that directly relate to their real-life equivalents, such as construction pink and earth brown. But he occasionally departs into more expressive usage, as when he suggests equivalence between the building of the painting and the construction of a city by leaving the earth the same color as the canvas.

Benson’s restrained palette reflects the cool, dispassionate atmosphere of the generic modernist glass box. He reminds us that modernist architecture began as a revolutionary movement with the intention of transforming society and reshaping the world, and that we now know this did not happen, especially for the buildings in these paintings, which tend to dominate their surroundings despite their isolation and apparent neglect.

In Liars (Talking Skulls),the once shiny symbols of modern, streamlined efficiency are now relics tinged with grime. A banal, graffiti-covered cement wall separates them from the foreground, which may or may not be a superhighway. Low-lying, soot-colored clouds suggest that the buildings are sitting in their own pile of pollution—apt symbols of the rifts between urban and landscape planning, architecture and the humans it was meant to serve.

April 15 – June 4

Artist’s Reception: April 15, 5:00-7:00 p.m.

Contact:
Meghan Ferguson
505 995 0231
info@eightmodern.net

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Erik Benson: Eminent Domain.
Erik Benson’s contemporary landscape paintings are simultaneously dystopian and romantic, exhibiting a discerning intelligence and graphic punch. He works with acrylic paint, which he spreads in thin layers on a glass table to dry before using an X-Acto knife to cut it into shapes. Benson peels off these decal-like pieces and collages them into the picture, building up the surface of the canvas into a low-relief in a process that mirrors the constructed nature of the buildings and urban sites that he depicts.

“I am interested in the mimetic relationship between the architectural subjects in the paintings and the process in which they are produced,” Benson says. “I’m interested in how this construction process allows in a painting vocabulary an exploration of unexamined things.”

The result is work of arresting yet disquieting beauty. His painting, “Condo #1,” depicts a colorless winter sky and a tree dropping the last of its leaves in front of a concrete and glass apartment tower with a kaleidoscopic array of windows.  The dramatic composition, flattened picture space, and almost wabi-sabi aesthetic are reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints.

The New Yorker described Benson’s style as one “in which old-fashioned color-field abstraction merges with a dystopic, Pop-ish interest in the junky emptiness of highway on-ramps, strip malls and corporate offices. …His layered acrylic canvases… [are] works with a jigsawlike density, a gloomy/garish palette, and a keen sense of line. The compositions manage to express humor, loathing and curiosity all at once.”

Despite the desolation of the scenes he portrays, Benson’s paintings retain a remarkable vitality, energized both by his dedicated, thoughtful process and the inherent familiarity of his subject matter. Benson finds truth and beauty in the urban blight that is often left overlooked and unexamined.

Benson was born in Detroit and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a former New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship recipient and has an upcoming residency scheduled for 2011 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. His work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America and ArtNews.

Eight Modern is open Monday through Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. For further information and image requests, contact Meghan Ferguson at (505) 995-0231 or info@eightmodern.net.

Erik Benson’s paintings are quiet commentaries on our architectural world.  His works critique uniformity and gentrification in American neighborhoods.  In an ArtNews review, Christopher French observed, “Erik Benson represents a persuasive, dystopian take on the American landscape.  In his paintings on canvas and paper, the normalcy of suburban views dominated by edifices of glass and steel is rudely interrupted-marked by decay or overwhelmed by ominous emissions suggestive of pollution or explosion.”  Benson employs a flat, shape-based technique to deliver an atmospheric feeling of loneliness.  Using an X-ACTO knife, he cuts shapes out of acrylic paint, which he has allowed to dry on sheets of glass.  He then “builds” his paintings with these shapes, layering them on canvas or paper in a manner that mimics the construction of an actual building.  Benson developed his distinctive technique after he became allergic to oil paints during graduate school and was forced to experiment with the more plastic quality of acrylics.  He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, surrounded by the buildings that inspire his work.

TAI Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Erik Benson: Urban Americana.

Erik Benson’s new work investigates the physical and psychological infrastructure of the urban environment. Through his unique, collaged acrylic paintings and a new series of watercolors, the artist’s city scapes and urban still lifes create a visual language that communicates the intermingling of “place and placelessness.”

Like a twenty-first century flâneur, Benson wanders the city observing street culture, marginal spaces, and discarded objects. From these unexamined fragments, he creates scenes in which public space intersects with individual and cultural interventions.

In Braintree (seer/thinker), a cold, International Style high rise is set against a graffitied concrete wall in the foreground. Plastered with drawings and spray painted with neon colors,the wall injects personal identity into an atmosphere overwhelmed withanonymity. Elements of human creativity, such as the patchwork of yarn adorning a tree in no title (Knit Bomb), and wry humor, as in the forlorn, smiling face humanizing a plastic bag in Thank you, enliven the otherwise deserted cityscapes.

Benson uses a unique process in which he pours acrylic paint onto sheets of glass, allows it to become solid and elastic, and then cuts it into shapes and peels them off. These pieces are then collaged onto canvas to build up an image, a process that echoes the built environment of the metropolis.

Of his scenes, Benson said in a statement, “They are depictions of mundane found objects collaged together to create a kind of totem to the Everyday… This project started about a year and a half ago as research for ‘garbage’paintings. I saw things discarded on the street and they served as studies for forensic still lifes, implying other connotations than just garbage.”

Benson was born in Detroit and currently lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. He received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He is a former New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship recipient and was artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. His work has been written about in The New YorkTimes, The New Yorker, theLos Angeles Times, Art in Americaand ArtNews.

If Cubism allowed us to break into pieces the complexities of the world and lay them out in two dimensions, we might view painter Erik Benson’s collaged acrylic paintings in similar terms. Instead of smashing things to pieces, Benson’s work begins as deconstructions,reconstructed. The artist’s paint-as-collage process grew from a simple misfortune—an allergy to oil paint—and the subsequent need to find a new way forward. Next was the discovery of dried drops of paint on the floor, which he peeled off and used to collage. From this resourceful beginning, Benson’s practice has grown mature and methodical: he paints acrylics onto sheets of glass, allows the paint to dry to a point of elasticity, and carefully cuts the shapes he then collages onto canvas.

His images almost exclusively deal with the mise-en-scène of the urban environment. Housing projects, office buildings, nonspecific cement walls, and otherwise marginal places comprise the scenes in Urban Americana, his recent exhibition at TAI Modern (through October 4). Most of these subjects are eyesores that stand somewhere between cold anonymity and desperate stabs at reinvention. Similarly, they also stand somewhere between the manufactured or constructed and the incidental effects of natural decay and happenstance. While it would be easy to write them off as glorifications of urban blight, these paintings dive deeper under the surface and provide a nuanced starting point in thinking about the city that neither glorifies nor deplores the difficulties of urban decay.

Each building stands alone in a gray, unforgiving sky. In no title (Knit Bomb) (2015), a building speckled with pink, blue and gray windows rises into a white gray sky behind a leafless tree. The tree has been knit bombed, a form of graffiti in which public fixtures—trees, fire hydrants, stop signs—are wrapped in knitted accoutrements. In the artist’s statement, he refers to capturing these mundane moments as creating “a kind of totem to the Everyday.” Framed this way, the paintings capture and preserve the easily overlooked, even temporary moments in a city’s life. But the repetition and accumulation of these small moments—a knit-bombed tree, or a newly graffitied wall—very much affect daily life. If we think of the metropolis as a body, an entity that lives and dies, can be sick or healthy, the daily life of its inhabitants is an essential part of that body,and is both dependent upon and directly affects the health of that body.

Benson’s singular vision and unique process cull poignant moments to explicate this proposition. While some work can fall into a trap of relying on a unique process to justify itself, Benson’s process continues to stand up to the larger issues within the work. The sharp precision and calculating nature of the process translates well into the overall aesthetic. Each image communicates a “piece-y-ness,” in which we can see that the built environment is comprised of a build-up of layers, both literally and figuratively. Build, decay, build, decay; the circle of a city’s life is tangible in Benson’s pieced-together knit bombs and pasted graffiti. It is also evident in the pairing of dismal brown and gray buildings accented by unnatural neons and borderline putrid pinks and teals. They evoke equal parts appreciation for the indomitable human spirit to beautify, and pity for such seemingly futile efforts.

The exhibition is not without humor. A series of small watercolors, the Gratitude Series, depicts plastic bags. Cast offs from big box stores, drug stores, or take-out restaurants, the bags are caught up on bits of weeds or otherwise crumpled up and abandoned. They are minimally rendered landscapes or still lifes and serve as studies of the minutiae that comprise daily life. The artist’s dedicated observance of such small, quirky details adds some humanity back into these otherwise figure-less places. In Smiley Thank You (2015), a big yellow smiley face peers out at us from a plastic bag, one of his eyes askew. This is the closest we come to seeing a subject populate these images, and the inclusion pulls at the heart strings, invoking pity, affection, and curiosity. The artist’s output feels like a somewhat neurotic vision made tangible: a vision that observes and re imagines reality according to some pathology. Ultimately these images help us observe the city environment in all of its nuance: caught up in the cycle of life and death, diseased and recovering, inhuman yet home to so many.