Fred Bendheim: "The Elements"
September 7 - October 8, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 9, 4 - 6 pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, September 23, 4:40 pm
BROOKLYN, NY – 440 Gallery is proud to present “The Elements,” an exhibition of abstract, monochrome works by Fred Bendheim. For his sixth solo show at the gallery, Bendheim has continued to explore his passion for shaped paintings, as he has done for the past 15 years. While his primary medium is shaped, painted PVC board, he has included two works on wood and aluminum.
Although Bendheim sees himself as primarily a painter, these shaped works bridge the gap between painting and sculpture. With a Zenlike simplicity, he pares down forms to their essence and then paints them in a single color with variations in tone. This unique process allows him a freedom of expression while maintaining a bold compositional method.
“The Elements” refers to both the building blocks of the natural world and of visual art. Abstract forms are transformed into earth, air, water, wood and fire, with celestial imagery in abundance. Circles, spirals, ellipses and the empty spaces within them create elegant, spare, yet playful compositions. Some of the works are inspired by Native American art — strong shapes and a deceptively simple palette — a reflection of Bendheim’s upbringing in Arizona by a Hopi-Navajo guardian.
Freed from the rectilinear constraints of conventional canvas, Bendheim’s pieces maintain a feeling of space as two-dimensional sculptures based on elaborate process and experimentation. Each piece’s silhouette is enlivened by meticulously designed interior cutouts. The colorful geometric forms with hard-edged shapes guide the eye without any bends or breaks.
Several works are tondos, shaped paintings implying a celestial realm that glows out of negative spaces. Do coiling shapes restrain or run free? Do forms embrace or create a pathway to another area? For Bendheim, these comparisons are part of a totality.
Says the artist, “I like using the open-ended format of shaped, non-rectangular works. It allows me a freedom to depart from the earthbound rectangle. The walls become part of each piece, to have a conversation in space with the shapes and colors I have chosen.”
Fred Bendheim has had numerous one-person shows, and his works are in collections worldwide, including The Museum of Arts and Design, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Montclair Art Museum, The National Museum of Costa Rica, The Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, The Plotkin Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Denise Bibro Fine Art, Jason McCoy Gallery, Los Angeles International Airport and The Mayo Center for Humanities in Medicine.
His commissions include fountain-sculptures for Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, murals for Brooklyn and paintings for the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, among others. His past works have taken the forms of large room-sized installations, outdoor billboards with children's art, sculptures, fountains and mural-sized drawings. He has written articles for the British journal The Lancet, and he has been on the faculty of The Art Students League and The College of Mount Saint Vincent, NY. He was featured in Created in Brooklyn, a documentary series at the Brooklyn Public Library, and he was awarded a New York City Artist Corps grant in 2022. Fred has lived and worked in Brooklyn since 1984.
IN THE PROJECT SPACE: The Repeated Image
James Acevedo • Amanda Michele Brown • Gail Flanery
James Acevedo, Amanda Michele Brown, and Gail Flanery each uses repetition as a means of exploring imagery. Through each iteration, an idea coheres around the reference to a prior image, or process. By building a work using the repetition of an image, new and unpredicted avenues can be explored.
James Acevedo’s drawings in India ink and walnut ink on paper are an essential part of his artistic practice. Many artists use preparatory drawings for their paintings, but Acevedo’s stand on their own as accomplished works of art. These drawings are part of a process that begins with an observation that he renders multiple times. This in-depth investigation of the subject through repetition and experimentation allows the artist to achieve a full grasp of his subject. As Acevedo states, “With drawing I am most free to experiment and approach an understanding of what I observe and imagine as I walk through the city.”
Amanda Michele Brown uses pattern and the repetition of forms to explore time and memory in her watercolors. The transparent color washes also incorporate ink and other media that make use of mark-making to give the painting a framework. By building up layers of similar shapes, we see an echo of what went before, a thing partially obscured yet still visible. We envision each layer as a fleeting moment, thus breaking down memory into structure and movement.
Gail Flanery’s mixed media works on paper are the result of various methods of printmaking, and other techniques such as collage. She also incorporates diverse mediums, including pastels and ink. These monotypes are unique pieces that originate as color fields and are built up by overlaying more color. Flanery’s work is structured around landscape, but it becomes abstract through her process of repeating layers, which gives us a realistic depiction of depth on the flat surface of her paper.