Erik Benson: Stacks

This catalogue accompanies Erik Benson’s Stacks series, in which the artist interrogates the legacy of modernist urban planning. Through careful analysis of works like Golden Tower (2016), the publication illuminates how Benson’s unique method—pouring acrylic paint onto glass, cutting shapes once solidified, and collaging them onto canvas—creates a material metaphor for the built environment he depicts, while his juxtaposition of forbidding housing projects with whimsical “totems” assembled from mundane objects generates a productive tension between modernist utopianism and contemporary urban experience. Benson’s practice collapses traditional distinctions between painting and collage, representation and construction, creating works that embody what the artist terms a “street art ethos” while offering a nuanced critique of architectural modernism’s unfulfilled promises.

Published by Edward Tyler Nahem, New York, 2016

Essay by David Ebony

Designed by Mohamed Hassan

Softcover, fully illustrated, 18 pages

_{Artworks © Erik Benson}