I remember the time I first saw a Karl Benjamin painting, in the mid-1970s at one of the galleries at the Claremont Colleges. The painting depicted a grid of primary colors, yellow, aqua and bright green as oblique lines and trapezoids, all set energetically against a quietly neutral background. I marveled at the vibrancy of the chromatic clash. The color adjacencies seemed to sing with a magisterial energy, investing the very air with an alien, but poised, musicality. Then, moving in for a closer look at the surface of the work, I was astonished at the fastidious surface of the canvas. How did the man create such clean edges for those blocks of color? How were those impeccable surfaces generated? Surely, not with a paint brush, I speculated.
At Louis Stern Fine Arts, “Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of Abstraction, 1950-1980” is exemplary.