Brian Gross Fine Art is pleased to present Karl Benjamin: Selected Paintings 1967-1978. A major Southern California painter and one of the original Hard-edge abstract painters, the exhibition focuses on Benjamin’s intensive exploration of color relationships through compositional structure.

An intuitive painter, Karl Benjamin (1925-2012) was deeply interested in the expressive possibilities created by combining and shaping color. Works such as #14 (1977) employ fuchsias, blues, greens, and reds as narrow stripes of contrasting colors that vibrate with intensity. In #3 (1969) Benjamin divided the canvas into irregular polygons, where interlocking areas of red, orange, yellow and blue form a composition without end. Works like #1 (1970) are visually charged, gridded arrangements of right triangles, whose complex arrangements of color both imply and subvert a sense of perceptual depth. Benjamin’s use of bold pattern and color, combined with the deceptively flat surfaces of his paintings, give each work a unique optical presence.

In 1959, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized a landmark exhibition entitled “Four Abstract Classicists” presenting works by four Los Angeles artists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin. The show’s curator coined the term “hard edge painting,” noting their similar stylistic concerns. Their works are characterized by clean edged, conjoined geometric forms rendered in flat color and occupying the entire picture plane. Benjamin’s work has been featured in numerous important exhibitions, including Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury, which debuted at the Orange County Museum of Art in 2007 and later travelled to the Oakland Museum and other U.S. venues; A Conversation With Color: Karl Benjamin, Paintings 1953 – 1995 at the Claremont Museum of Art, in 2009; and Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Paintings and Sculpture 1945-1970 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2011.