Fletcher Benton

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Folded Square Alphabet D (1981), Offenbach am Main

Fletcher Benton (born February 25, 1931 in Jackson (Ohio) - † June 26, 2019 ) was an American painter and steel sculptor .

Life

Benton studied from 1953 to 1956 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he moved to California in 1956. There he taught from 1959 to 1966 at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, 1966/1967 at the San Francisco Art Institute and from 1967 to 1986 at California State University, San Jose.

Benton had his first solo exhibition at Gump's Gallery, San Francisco in 1959. Benton lived and worked in San Francisco.

Awards (selection)

  • 1979 Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts , Academy Institute for Arts and Letters, New York
  • 1982 Award of Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Sculpture , San Francisco Arts Commission
  • 1994 Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Rio Grande University, Rio Grande, Ohio
  • 2008 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award , International Sculpture Center, Hamilton, New Jersey

Solo exhibitions (selection)

A catalog was published for the exhibitions marked with "K".

  • 1965 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
  • 1972 La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla / San Diego
  • 1978 San Jose Museum of Art, California (also 1982 K )
  • 1979 Milwaukee Art Center, Milwaukee (further stations: Chicago, Oakland, Newport Harbor and Portland, Oregon) K ;
American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York
Gotha Art Forum, Cologne

plant

Steel Watercolor Triangle Ring (1993), Cologne

At the beginning of his artistic career in the 1950s and 1960s, Benton painted abstract pictures. Benton first attracted international attention with his battery-powered kinetic sculptures , which were particularly striking because of their color. He became friends with George Rickey after he had exhibited at the international exhibition Directions in Kinetic Sculpture at the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley and the Santa Barbara Art Museum in 1966.

In the mid-1970s he turned to steel sculptures, which - like his kinetic sculptures - are often made up of elementary geometric shapes (such as circles, triangles and squares). In these works Benton refers not least to Russian constructivism and the Bauhaus . He dedicated a whole series of works to the letters of the Latin alphabet: "Folded Square Alphabet". The movements of his earlier kinetic works are not only reminiscent of changing color and brightness effects, but also that (flat) steel sheets are folded, that, for example, circles or circular disks are cut out of square sheets and the parts are then put together to form three-dimensional letter sculptures. The viewer inevitably follows these movements in the manufacturing process in his mental imagination.

In the series of works “Balanced-Unbalanced” and “Steel Watercolor”, Benton, guided by his intuition, has been combining elementary geometric forms into open compositions since the early 1980s. His topic was not the mass that occupies the space, nor was the mass of the individual parts pondered out. Rather, Benton was interested in the dynamics of the diagonals or the apparent mobility of a light circle, which, in interaction with other forms that radiate calm, experience an exciting balance. "He is able to channel his intuition into structures of controlled aesthetic impact." [Peter Selz 2008]

Collections (selection)

literature

  • Fletcher Benton, Peter Selz and Collette Chattopadhyay: Fletcher Benton - The Kinetic Years . Hudson Hills Press, 2009
  • Fletcher Benton, Carter Ratcliff, and Collette Chattopadhyay: Fletcher Benton - An American Artist . Hudson Hills Press, 2009
  • David Finn: Fletcher Benton: The Alphabet . Rudder Finn Press, 2005
  • David Finn: Fletcher Benton . Catskill Press, 2003 (in English)
  • George Neubert, Peter Selz and Gerhard Kolberg: The New Constructivism of Fletcher Benton . Acatos, 2002
  • Edward Lucie-Smith, Paul J. Karlstrom: Fletcher Benton . Harry N. Abrams, 1990 (in English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary
  2. ^ Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award - The International Sculpture Center
  3. ^ Fletcher Benton: The Alphabet - Exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, July 30, 2009 to July 5, 2010
  4. ↑ Fletcher Benton Alphabet ( Memento of the original from May 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - Exhibition in the Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin, May 8th to June 19th, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.georg-kolbe-museum.de
  5. ^ Peter Selz: Geometric Sculpture in Equilibrium: Fletcher Benton . Sculpture 24 (5), June 2004 [in English]
  6. ↑ Fletcher Benton - Cedarhurst Sculpture Park . International Sculpture Center [in English]
  7. ↑ To German, for example: "He is able to channel his intuition in such a way that it manifests itself in structures with a controlled aesthetic effect."
  8. ^ Peter Selz: Fletcher Benton's Geometric Sculpture . In: Fletcher Benton Retrospective. Exhibition catalog of Galerie B. Haasner and SNZ Galleries, Wiesbaden, 2008, p. 6

Web links

Commons : Fletcher Benton  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Benton, Fletcher
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Jackson (Ohio)
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 2019