Benjamin Edwards: Automatic City

Solo exhibition

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent large-scale paintings and digital prints by Washington D.C. based artist Benjamin Edwards, on view November 4 – December 30, 2004. Automatic City is the artist’s second one-person exhibition with the gallery. Edwards was recently featured in the group exhibition Painting Pictures at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany 2003 and the 2003 Prague Biennale, Czech Republic.

Automatic City holds a mirror to contemporary society and reflects it back as hallucinatory utopian landscapes. Edwards deploys a seemingly inexhaustible dictionary of corporate identities and image branding, private and public building plans – interspersed with specific examples of architectural icons - into hybrid cityscapes filled with textural detail, both literal and depicted. About his recent work, the artist has stated:

“The initial concept and general visualization for an image always begin for me out of everyday experiences as a consumer, from the subconscious repetition of elements of the mass-cultural landscape which, and relentlessly, fall into my perception like droplets into an ocean. Mixed with aesthetic antennae willfully combing through this junkstream, and a tempered absorption of history and the patterns of past utopias, my hope is that a synthesis greater than the sum emerges, a nostalgically transcendental phenomenon. This new manifestation of previously unrelated and disorganized facts is an attempt to express something about the places we inhabit, the ones we have lost, the places we hoped to make, and the ones we hope to never see.”

Benjamin Edwards was born 1970 in Iowa City, Iowa, and lives and works in Washington, D.C. He studied at University of California in Los Angeles; the San Francisco Art Institute; and Rhode Island School of Design. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the New York Public Library, NY.