Karl Stanley Benjamin (American, 1925–2012) was a painter known for his exploration of color through hard-edge Abstract works. After serving in the Navy during the Second World War and then graduating from the University of Redlands, Benjamin began his career as a middle school teacher in California. He went on to receive an MFA from Pomona College, where he would also teach painting for the majority of his career. In the context of the 1950s Los Angeles-based art and Design scene, and in the company of artists such as Lorsel Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg, and John McLaughlin, Benjamin came to prominence for his luminous, colourful geometric paintings.
He rose to fame in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles based Abstract Classicists and subsequently produced a critically acclaimed body of work that explores a vast array of color relationships.
During his lifetime, he was twice awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Visual Arts, and his work was exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
His work is represented in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He lived in Claremont, CA, until his death in 2012.
“I am an intuitive painter, despite the ordered appearance of my paintings, and am fascinated by the infinite range of expression inherent in color relationships. For the past fifteen or twenty years, I have been working with systems including relatively simple numerical progressions, modular constructions, and random sequences. Images formed thusly emerged in very surprising and gratuitous ways, as opposed to being drawn or designed in what had become, for me, on hindsight, a rather self-conscious operation.”
K. B. (from a 1986 interview)