Steve DiBenedetto

Project Room

Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present a solo show of new paintings by Steve DiBenedetto which continues his investigation of organic oddities, cubist structures, and vast mazes of interconnection.

Dominated by singular forms, DiBenedetto’s compositions depict fusions of the body and invented structural systems or the conflation of “inner psychodramas with momentary evidence of an underlying rationality”. Working both additively and reductively with oil on canvas, he paints in an archeological manner, allowing his process to conjure, erode, and distort the central figure, pushing it to “the brink of (un)recognition". Utilizing a palette which evokes the notion of a neon sign embedded in a muddy bog, DiBenedetto’s sculptural portraits juxtapose the luminous clarity of blinding pinks, greens, and purples with a murky rough-edged surface reality. As such, the paintings summon “the distraught relationship of the inner mind to the utter confusion of the ‘so called’ real world.”

Steve DiBenedetto (b. 1958) has exhibited extensively including solo shows at Académie Conti | Le Consortium (Vosne-Romanée, France), galerie frank elbaz (Paris, France) Cherry and Martin (Los Angeles, CA), the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), Half Gallery (New York, NY), David Nolan (New York, NY), and Daniel Weinberg Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). He has been included in museum exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), MoMA PS1 (Long Island City, NY), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Neues Museum (Nurnberg, Germany), Kunstverein Museum Schloss Morsbroich (Leverkusen, Germany), MAMCO (Geneva, Switzerland) and others. His work is included in public collections such as The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). DiBenedetto lives and works in New York.