Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Ben Sanders’s Polished, Abstract Paintings and Found Objects

An initial encounter with the work of Ben Sanders might leave the viewer perplexed. Are they retro digitally painted screen savers? Are they just stickers on a sheet of paper? Through expert color choices and impressively crisp lines, Sanders creates paintings that trick the eye. His acrylic and oil works sometimes even look photographic. There is definitely something decidedly vintage and even cartoon-like about the works, most of which revolve around food.

An initial encounter with the work of Ben Sanders might leave the viewer perplexed. Are they retro digitally painted screen savers? Are they just stickers on a sheet of paper? Through expert color choices and impressively crisp lines, Sanders creates paintings that trick the eye. His acrylic and oil works sometimes even look photographic. There is definitely something decidedly vintage and even cartoon-like about the works, most of which revolve around food.

His sculptures feel even more animated; the artist created a series of pots with hilarious faces. The strange pots hold plants and are arranged in photos with various household items. In Pot No. 9 the curious object sits to the side next to a hand that wears a yellow cleaning glove and holds a clean rag. Behind the pot you can barely make out a small Oscar Mayer hot dog truck toy. His work as a whole seems to hint at domestic scenes and childhood memories, but in some pieces we don’t get as many clues. Even at their most cryptic, Sanders’s works feel fun, enigmatic and innovative all at once.

Found Objects:

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
The feelings of horror and rapture collide at high speeds when viewing Lauren Marx's work. The St. Louis-based artist creates beautiful vignettes that speak to the cycle of life. Rather than a cleaned-up, Disneyfied verson of nature, her paintings give us raw depictions of birth and death. Influenced my scientific illustrations and the Baroque period alike, Marx's maximalist mixed-media works present these cyclical phenomena in visually appealing ways, often fusing the chaotic elements of nature into stylized compositions with an emphasis on design. Marx's solo show, "American Wilderness," opens at Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle on May 7.
Something interesting happens when when artists like Alan and Carolynda Macdonald, who have the painting fundamentals mastered, decide to subvert expectations and perplex a viewers expectations conceptually. Click to read the Hi-Fructose exclusive interview.
Painter Dean Reynolds likens himself to a magician. "The work is about the act of painting a window to a world of fantasy, of the surreal, of inner experience," he writes in his artist statement. "The images hint to me to make them into a drawing or painting and then I work to make them into reality." On May 2 at Parlor Gallery in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Reynolds will present a new series of surreal, candy-colored paintings for his latest solo show. The female protagonists in his work explore sunshine-yellow landscapes that seem to belong to another dimension. We follow these goddess-like characters into scenes rife with incongruous imagery and symbolism.
Polish painter Daniel Maczynski does not concern himself with the subtext of his work. Rather, his geometric portraits are studies in form and color. According to the artist, the meaning behind the work is for the viewer to decide. Maczynski paints with thick, textured brushstrokes that evoke the physicality of the paint. In his portraits, he veers from tightly-rendered details to loose abstraction, allowing the human figures to morph into psychedelic swirls of color.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List