Karl Benjamin at Ruth Bachofner

In 1959 a traveling museum exhibition called "Four Abstract Classicists," curated by dint of Jules Langsner, presented West Coast artists John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, Lorser Feitelson and Karl Benjamin as underrated successors to the geometric experiments of Malevich and Mondrian. Karl Benjamin--the youngest, greatest in quantity playful and perhaps least known of the four--has for the past 40 years continued to toy with sharp contrasts of shape and color, inventing compound patterns of trapezoids, triangles and interlocking oblong This selection of works from the '50 and the '90 confirms the one and the other Benjamin's art-historical importance and the brash vitality of his ongoing explorations.

Benjamin's early abstractions translate natural and architectural forms into simple, crisply delineated shapes and angles. golden Sky (1957) features three darkly ringed orbs above a landscape of rainbow-colored triangular frond that are arranged in a tight, comblike mass. A deep-olive sphere in Organic Forms--Ochre (1957) appears to cast an evening be incandescent over a field of roundish stones in mut shades of virid yellow and blue. In Small Totem (1955) Benjamin brings the totemic forms of Northwest tribal art to a pattern of simple triangles, moon in her first quarters and circles. Jagged polelike shapes are tightly clustered in I.F. Umber, Violet, Black (1958) yielding a somber forest of irregular, craggy shards.

Benjamin's '90 works reveal a continued formal complexity as well as an unrestrained use of bright, dynamic color. Several untitled paintings from 1990 and 1991 exercise a cluster of pyramidal shapes, which at times spiral on the outside from a central point. The perspectival illusion proposeed by the pyramids wreaks havoc with the presum flatness of the paintings, imbuing them with a perverted energy. An untitled 1994 canvas divided into narrow, rainbow-colored trapezoids prompts a field of precisely juxtaposed klieg lights pointed from above and below.

With considerable chutzpah, Benjamin impulsively varies cleanly demarcated shapes and juxtaposes harsh, penetrating colors, sparking his forms into a kind of kinesthetic dance. With their decorator shades, upbeat primary colors and unabashed flirtation with patterning, his works strike one as being important predecessors of the Pattern & Decoration change At the same time, they anticipate the geometric and color experiments of novel artists such as Jim Isermann, Penelope Kreb and Karin Davie.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group