Artist Statement:
My current work spans the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They are abstract, shaped paintings and relief sculptures, usually on wood or PVC, which I call “shapings”. My subjects are usually abstract: they are made of forms, lines, colors and their relationships to each other and the spaces that they inhabit. My work is based on principles, so I do not rely only on the precedence of my own work, or the work of other artists. I work using a combination of intuition and principles of composition. I try to keep my art alive, fresh, spontaneous and challenging and I find working in a non-rectangular format gives me a freedom to express visual impulses, and allows for surprising results. I have worked in various media and sizes, from installations in entire buildings, outdoor billboards, to the intimate in scale. I imagine the sum of my work, throughout the 40-plus years of its making, as something living, like a tree, with many varied branches.
Shapings is the latest branch of that living creation.
About the Artist:
Fred Bendheim was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1956. He has lived 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 world-wide including: The Museum of Arts & Design, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Montclair Art Museum; The National Gallery of Costa Rica; The Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, Italy; The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, The Plotkin Museum, The Brooklyn Public Library, NY; Denise Bibro Fine Art, NY; Jason Mccoy Gallery, Bradley International Airport, Los Angeles, CA; The Mayo Center for Humanities, Scottsdale, AZ. His commissions include 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 teaches at the Art Students League and The College of Mt. Saint Vincent in New York City.
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