BIOGRAPHY

Fred Bendheim was born in Arizona, USA, in 1956. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY since 1983. As a teenager, he apprenticed with the pioneer surrealist painter Philip Curtis. Fred has had numerous one-person shows, and his works are in collections worldwide including The Museum of Arts & Design, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The National Gallery of Costa Rica; The Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, Italy; The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, The Benton Museum of Art, The Plotkin Museum, The Brooklyn Public Library; 440 Gallery, NY; Jason Mccoy Gallery, Bradley International Airport, Los Angeles, CA; The Mayo Center for Humanities, Scottsdale, AZ. His commissions include murals, sculptures for Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, and paintings for the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, among others. His past art has taken the form of large room-sized installations, outdoor billboards with children’s art, sculptures, and fountains made with many materials, as well as mural-sized drawings. He has written articles about art for the British journal The Lancet, and he has taught at the Art Students League and The College of Mt. Saint Vincent in New York City.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My art is like a tree with many branches. Form, line, and color are the ground that it grows in; intuition and feeling are its light source. The art spans boundaries between drawing, painting and sculpture, figuration and abstraction, and personal expression and site-specific public art. I work daily on my art, making drawings, paintings, public art, and murals. My subjects are abstract, and they are real and accessible, being about the spirit found in forms, lines, colors, and the relationships of elements to each other and the sites where they live. I have made several site-specific public art installations, including murals. I have organized community workshops, collaborating with students and their families to make art. I am inspired by the forms and colors of the natural and human worlds and by a desire to express something larger than myself through them. I explore and experiment with forms and principles from nature. I also am inspired by art from various cultures, especially native American art. Community-based projects include collaborations on murals with Brooklyn schools and art-making projects with under-served families in community gardens sponsored by a grant from City Artist Corps and NYFA. My art is a creation-tree that I cultivate daily, and it also cultivates myself.