Occupation Artist Name Benjamin King | Role Artist | |
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Born 1977 Durham, North Carolina, United States Parent(s) Meredith Jane West and Andrew Phillippe King | ||
Benjamin King (born 1977 in Durham, North Carolina) is an American artist. He currently lives and works in New York City.
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Education
In Chicago, Illinois, Benjamin King received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000 and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Chicago received in 2005. In 1999 in Umbria, Italy he met and studied with artist and professor Nicolas Carone, with whom the notion of art as metaphysical study had a strong effect on the direction of his work.
Creative work
King's work has been exhibited internationally in galleries including Longhouse Projects, ACME, Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Ridgway Exhibitions, KUMUKUMU Gallery, Dvorak Sec and The Painting Center. In 2011 in the Canadian art journal Border Crossings, artist-writer-curator Cameron Skene wrote about Benjamin King's work, "King's are deceptively simple paintings, and the comparison to both Phillip Guston and the early-century Arthur Dove is hard to avoid. He's has [sic] a sharp eye for the rules of paint, not unlike Dove who said, 'we cannot express the light in nature because we have no sun. We can only express the light we have in ourselves.'" In 2009 in New York City with artist Jay Henderson he formed the roaming curatorial project HKJB. This work has resulted eight group exhibitions in New York City, Montreal, and Mexico City. HKJB also publishes a blog called HKJBlog with permanent contributors reporting on visual arts in New York City and Los Angeles. HKJB was included in the 2010 Exit Art exhibition and 2012 art history text Alternative Histories New York Art Spaces 1960–2010, published by MIT Press. In 2011, King, with artist Rob Nadeau, curated the group exhibition Snowclones for Joshua Abelow's ARTBLOGARTBLOG pop-up show series held in Ross Bleckner's Chelsea New York studio.
Other
His parents Meredith Jane West and Andrew Phillipe King are both research scientists in the field of animal behavior and infant development at Indiana University, authors on the subject of Mozart's starling infant social interaction and babbling.