October 9 - November 9, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 4:00 - 6:00

Artist Talk: Sunday, October 26, 4:40 - 6:00

440 Gallery is pleased to present Music For My Eyes, a solo exhibition of abstract paintings and sculpture by Brooklyn-based artist Fred Bendheim. This exhibition brings together a selection of vibrant, lyrical works created in the last two years, exploring the expressive power of line, color, and form. This is Bendheim’s fifth solo show at 440 Gallery.

Bendheim’s paintings hum with energy—dynamic compositions where color flows like tone and lines pulse like rhythm. With a visual language that evokes musical structure, the works in Music For My Eyes unfold as intricate webs of movement and emotion. Each piece suggests an invisible architecture of vibrations, where geometric elements balance spontaneity and control, echoing the improvisational spirit of jazz and abstract expressionism.

Shooting Stars II exemplifies Bendheim’s signature balance of intention and improvisation. Vivid orange bands, striking purple curves, and glowing yellow stars interact in a push and pull of spatial movement, each advancing and receding in a rhythmic exchange. Embedded within are subtle references to stars and motion — recurring symbols in Bendheim’s visual vocabulary. The lines that define the forms are delicate and impermanent, both suggestions and boundaries. They serve not as structures but as thresholds—demarcating space. The resulting forms, though seemingly in flux, are held in a precise equilibrium; shift one, and the entire harmony falters.

As Bendheim describes it, “These paintings are meant to be seen the way music is heard—not just with the eyes, but with the whole body. My work is a dialogue between intuition and intention, the spiritual and the material, the personal and the universal. I create works that explore the dynamics of color, form, and space, often in ways that defy traditional boundaries.”

Fred Bendheim was born in Phoenix, AZ and has been making art for more than fifty years. As a teen-ager Fred apprenticed with the artist Philip Curtis, one of the founders of The Phoenix Art Museum. Bendheim attended The University of California, Davis, where he studied with the artists William T. Wiley and Wayne Thiebaud. He graduated from Pomona College, cum laude, and lived in San Francisco, CA for six years, where he exhibited at SFMOMA. Fred moved to Brooklyn, NY in 1984.

He has had numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums: SFMOMA, The Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, The Montclair Art Museum, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, The National Museum of Costa Rica, The Neiman-Marcus Collection, Bradley International Airport, The Brooklyn Public Library, and the Belskie Museum. He has completed four public murals and has made fountains, drawings, collages, paintings, sculpture, and installations. Bendheim is a teaching artist at The Art Students League of NY and has taught at The College of Mt. Saint Vincent, Young Audiences of New York, and The Brooklyn Museum. Fred was a subject of "Created In Brooklyn", a documentary series on Brooklyn creatives by photographer, Randy Duchaine at the Brooklyn Public Library. He has written numerous articles about art for the British medical journal, The Lancet. Fred's art has taken him throughout the world, including exhibits in South Korea, Costa Rica, and Germany. Bendheim has been awarded grants by City Artist Corps and the New York Foundation for The Arts. Fred's work is represented by New York galleries: Julie Keyes Fine Art, 490 Atlantic Gallery, and 440 Gallery, and it is in the collections of several museums.

In the Project Space: “Framing the View”

By Leigh Blanchard, Joy Makon, Catherine Orrok, Janet Pedersen

The four artists showing in the Project Space all have distinctive views. Whether figurative or abstract, the perspective of any given work is determined by what the artist chooses to include within its borders. Throughout the creative process, each decision, from medium to composition to format, is an essential choice that frames each artist’s view.

Leigh Blanchard’s photographs on paper are the result of a multi-step process. She begins with multiple printed photographs. Then, using collage techniques, the photos are reconfigured and finally photographed again. The ultimate composition is a reflection of themes that Blanchard has been exploring in response to the current state of the world: escapism, self-reflection, new beginnings. Seeking refuge in her work, she finds the start of something new in these painterly photographs.

Joy Makon paints watercolors of familiar and well-known places: Park Slope’s Ninth Street by Prospect Park, iconic Lincoln Center in Manhattan. By choosing to paint these locations at sunset and at night, Makon focuses her attention on mood and atmosphere. The drama of the light, sky, and buildings at night is captured in Lincoln Center Sketch, a notable view to anyone who has stood on that plaza and been awed by the grandeur. In describing the scene she captures in Sunset on Ninth Street, Makon states, “There is a certain point when the sun has almost set, and surroundings become ambiguous, forms blur, and brief flashes of light define what one sees.”

Catherine Orrok’s abstract acrylic paintings use a grid-like structure to order invented space. She emphasizes process and materiality through the application of paint with evident brush marks, lending a duality to the work. On the one hand, we see a perceptual response to the forms and colors; at the same time, we feel the physicality of the object. Working within a constrained format like a square, or the elongated vertical of Are We There Yet, calls attention to the substance of painting. As Orrok states, “The shapes, format, paint-handling, and touch all contribute to the creation of a little world that is unique to each painting.”

Janet Pedersen’s paintings on paper and panel represent cityscapes based on iPhotos taken around Brooklyn and Manhattan. The wealth of visual material amidst the jumble of architectural mass prompts Pedersen to ask herself how to capture a composition, whether en plein air or in the studio. Rather than rendering the scene directly, she reframes it by using various parts of the locations captured in her photos and combining them to create a new, imagined view. The patterns of the cityscape become her underlying structure, and Pedersen finds a rhythm that guides her in the physical process of putting down paint.