CLMA Exhibition Explores the Complexities of Abstraction to Mark Karl Benjamin’s 100th Birthday
For Immediate Release
July 14, 2025
Press Contact: Catherine McIntosh
909 626-1386, cell 713 829-9338 cmcintosh1011@gmail.com
Complications in Color
August 2–November 16, 2025
Claremont Lewis Museum of Art, 200 W. First St., Claremont, CA
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 2, 6-9 pm
The Claremont Lewis Museum of Art exhibition Complications in Color will mark the 100th birthday of Karl Benjamin (1925-2012), legendary Claremont painter and visionary of the 1950s hard-edge abstraction painting movement. The exhibition will celebrate the beauty of abstraction while revealing its deeper complexities in the work of Florence Arnold, Karl Benjamin, June Harwood, Rachel Lachowicz, and Terry O’Shea.
Generously sponsored by Gould Asset Management LLC, Complications in Color will open with a reception on Saturday, August 2 from 6-9 p.m. and will remain on view through November 16, 2025. The Museum is open Thursday through Sunday in the historic Claremont Depot at 200 W. First Street next to the Metrolink Station. For hours and more information visit clmoa.org.
THE EXHIBITION
Traditionally, abstract art has been discussed in terms of pure form, often overlooking its psychological and political dimensions. While Benjamin and his fellow Abstract Classicists (as they became known following a 1959 exhibition at LACMA) were celebrated for their innovative approach to painting, talented women artists faced roadblocks to recognition in this male-dominated canon.
Florence Arnold’s and June Harwood’s contributions to the genre demonstrate excellence in this field that has been too often overlooked. These three painters are masters of distilling relationships between colors and forms down to a vibrational dynamism. Rachel Lachowicz introduces a feminist lens to geometric abstraction and Terry O’Shea expands the parameters of abstraction through his sculptural work in resin.
By presenting works from diverse generations, Complications in Color offers opportunities for new insight into the multifaceted role color and abstraction play in our culture and Southern California art
history. Historical, political, and psychological contexts provide a prism of interpretation for these seemingly simple objects. Direct link to the web page: https://clmoa.org/exhibit/complications-in-color.
THE ARTISTS
Karl Benjamin was a pioneer of hard-edge abstraction, a painting style that employed fields of solid color in nonrepresentational compositions and rejected the tenets of abstract expressionism that dominated a New York-centric postwar discourse. The hard-edge painters presented color as subject in a restrained yet playful new style that was subtly radical and quintessentially SoCal. Benjamin experimented endlessly throughout his prolific career, but his paintings were always hard-edge and always placed color center stage. With a deft mastery of chromatic relationships, he instilled his paintings with a phenomenological vitality that hummed within meticulously constructed forms.
Florence Arnold arrived at painting mid-career after dedicating decades to music education. Despite this late start, Arnold embraced painting with a youthful vitality and established herself as an important hard-edge painter, drawing inspiration from her teacher Karl Benjamin. Utilizing her musical expertise, she juxtaposed colors that play off each other like notes in a chord.
June Harwood was an early innovator in the realm of hard-edge painting. While she wasn’t included in the ground-breaking Four Abstract Classicists exhibition curated by future spouse Jules Langsner, she was included in Langsner’s California Hard-Edge Painting exhibition, which was shown at the Pavilion Gallery, Balboa, California, in 1964. Her abstractions, which grew out of early experiments with collage and still-life, demonstrated a mastery of the picture plane, a seemingly effortless ability to destabilize the relationship between figure and ground. Harwood was never content to stick with a signature style. She produced various bodies of work in later years that increasingly reintroduced collage and organic textures to her work. Her wry sense of humor showed itself in the titles from her Rock Series, which employed the names of rock n roll bands with a tongue-in-cheek distance.
Rachel Lachowicz’s earlier work often employed direct appropriation of iconic male modernist works realized in lipstick or eye shadow, but more recent forms delve into abstraction without referential attribution. This ambiguity of form lends itself to a more subtle challenge of gender binaries and a deeper exploration of color and its phenomenological potential. In the context of Lachowicz’s work, the perceived “purity” of abstraction becomes layered with political complexity.
Terry O’Shea came out of the Venice Beach-based light and space scene of the 1960s, which was a movement born out of hard-edge painting. While O’Shea employed similar techniques of industrial space-age materials and meticulously polished translucent forms, he also stood apart from better known light and space sculptors due to his jester-like sensibility. Take, for example, his capsule sculptures. These pieces of beautifully layered resin are strikingly reminiscent of over-sized pills.
Viewers are left to wonder what mind-altering effects might take hold if one were to ingest these seductively beautiful objects.
PARTNER EXHIBITION AT CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY
CLMA will be partnering with the Claremont Graduate University Art Department to present a solo exhibition of Karl Benjamin’s work in their East & Peggy Phelps Galleries, running concurrently with Complications in Color. It’s All About the Benjamins, curated by David Pagel, CGU Professor of Art Theory and History, will feature rarely seen paintings from the artist’s estate. CLMA will present programming and events in coordination with CGU Art to celebrate the exhibitions at both venues.