Ben closed time

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Ben Schonzeit (born May 9, 1942 in Brooklyn , New York City , USA ) is an American contemporary painter and an important exponent of photorealism , who lives in New York.

life and work

Ben Schonzeit studied at the Cooper Union in New York until 1964 .

He had his first solo exhibitions in 1970 “ French & Co. ” in New York and in 1971 in the DeGestlo gallery in Hamburg and the Mikro gallery in Berlin .

Ben Schonzeit is known for his large-format, photo-realistic, mainly acrylic paintings of everyday objects, food, fruits, flowers, vegetables, animals or huge portraits of people. He enlarges the depicted objects down to the smallest detail and thus creates a new reality of perception. Some of his pictures have echoes of surrealism in their overdrawing .

Ben Schonzeit was a participant in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the pioneering Realism department and also represented as an artist at Documenta 6 in 1977. To this day he has exhibitions in major museums and galleries around the world, most recently in 2009 in “ Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s ” at the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin.

“The pictures I take are very often garish and coarse, the subjects are never the finest. I often focus (or not) on things that are usually dismissed as worthless ... and certainly have no real artistic value ... I hope to give the viewer a heightened experience and awareness of those things that one can encountered every day. "

- Ben closed time 

Important collections

(Selection)

Literature and Sources

  • Documenta 5. Survey of Reality, Imagery Today. 2 volumes (Vol. 1: Material, the presentation of the visual worlds and the artists. Volume 2: List of the exhibited works, the presented situations, the expected events, their nature, their manufacturers and owners, their organizers. General bibliography. Guide through the Exhibition. ). Documenta ua, Kassel 1972, ISBN 3-570-02856-9 (in ring binder).
  • Roland Nachtigäller , Friedhelm Scharf, Karin Stengel (eds.): Resubmission d5. A survey of the archive on Documenta 1972 (= series of publications of the documenta archive. Vol. 8). Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X .
  • Becker, Wolfgang: Ben Schonzeit , in: Kunstforum International, Volume 1; Mainz 1973, p. 130
  1. ^ Letter from Ben Schonzeit to his European dealer Mike Cullen dated August 9, 1971

Web links