Gotham West is a luxury residential building in The New York City neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. It features several high-end amenities for residents, including a curated rotating art exhibition. Art Assets has curated numerous exhibitions there, including the artists David Storey, Torkil Gudnason, Riitta Ikonen, and Jennifer Riley.
The art space is a 45-foot long wall in a large lounge that features cushy seating, work tables, and a glass-enclosed fire pit. It’s a space for residents to relax, get some work done, or socialize. The gallery wall is surrounded by seats that invite quiet contemplation of the art.
For Gotham’s rotating exhibitions, Art Assets carefully considers the resident makeup, the lounge setting, and the visceral feeling the art evokes. Gotham West is home to individuals and many families with children, so the art must appeal to a variety of tastes and ages and avoid controversial content or nudity.
With winter upon us and the cozy fire pit roaring away, Art Assets felt warm, colorful works would best suit the space. Among the artists proposed by Art Assets, the client selected Fred Bendheim, whose bright, abstract, gestural paintings will offer a sense of optimism and warmth through these gray and blustery months.
Painter Fred Bendheim works using a combination of intuition and visual principles of composition. He creates work that is alive, fresh, spontaneous, and challenging. He has worked in various media and sizes, from installations in entire buildings to the intimate in scale. In Bendheim’s words: “I imagine the sum of my work, throughout the 40-plus years of its making, as something living, like a tree, with many varied branches.”
Born in Phoenix, AZ, Fred Bendheim has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY since 1984. In his early education as an artist, he apprenticed with the pioneering painter Philip Curtis in Scottsdale, AZ. Later, Bendheim studied art with Joseph Piasentin at Pomona College and with Roland Reese at The Claremont Graduate School.
Bendheim’s commissions include sculptures for Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and paintings for the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Neiman-Marcus, and others. His past art has taken the form of large room-sized installations, outdoor billboards with children’s art, sculptures, and fountains made with many materials, as well as mural-sized drawings. He has written articles about art for the British journal, The Lancet, and he teaches art at the Art Students League in NYC and The College of Mt. Saint Vincent in NYC.
The artist has been featured in numerous solo and group shows, and his works are in collections worldwide, including The Museum of Arts & Design, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The National Gallery of Costa Rica; The Instituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, Italy; The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; The Montclair Museum of Art; The Plotkin Museum; The Brooklyn Public Library; Denise Bibro Fine Art, NY; Jason McCoy Gallery, Bradley International Airport, Los Angeles, CA; The Mayo Center for Humanities, Scottsdale, AZ.
Although Bendheim’s travels have taken him throughout the world, he says working in his studio has been his greatest adventure.