Ben Dowell

The paintings of Ben Dowell explore a stripped-down methodical language to yield luminous results. Dowell embraces the brute material fact of painting while incorporating purposefully restrictive elements. Using one brush size, regular spaced intervals of thick oil paint, and a geometrically restrained canvas; the artist presents us with hypnotic heavily-bodied paintings. His compositions are not pre-designed but rather developed slowly within the painting’s inherent process. These skewed, perspectival illusions sculpted from impasto paint create their own landscape of peaks and valleys. Breaking free from it’s own reduction, the marks explode across the canvases in deep colors that strengthen within its own randomness.

Dowell has shown his paintings in a number of exhibitions around the United States including Safe Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Sister Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, CANADA , NY, Jack Geary Contemporary, NY, The 2013 ArtPadSF Contemporary Art Fair, Beta Pictoris, San Francisco, CA, Festival of Ideas for the New City, The New Museum, New York (2011), and Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York, among others. In 2009 Dowell was awarded a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Fellowship in New York, NY.

Courtesy of Safe Gallery