Lauren Powell Presents:
~ Benjamin Cabral ~
Framed Feelings on Paper
Benjamin Cabral is known for his vibrant, heavily textured, hand beaded paintings & sculptures based on nightly reflective iPad drawings. These drawings usually only exist digitally, but due to the material availability + studio access limitations presented by quarantine, they have now been released via acrylic paint & gouache on paper. To incorporate his traditional oeuvre, Ben created frames from epoxy adorned with hand-cast resin beads. These frames were realized after excessively watching Tik Tok videos of people making clay and resin crafts, incorporating a material widely used and shared online as a creative expression during the pandemic. Pared down in material, but certainly not in doses of pain & pleasure, the relatability of each scene leaves the viewer feeling understood, loved, & hopeful - one with Cabral’s community.
Benjamin Cabral (b. 1993, San Diego) lives and works in Chicago, where he received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and also the Carrie Ellen Tuttle fellowship in painting. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose bead and rhinestone encrusted paintings and sculptures straddle the line between craft and contemporary art. His work is largely autobiographical and performative in nature, creating an honest, yet inherently unreliable, portrait of the artist examining the intersections between trauma and nostalgia, joy and sorrow, and the digital and the analog.. He has exhibited work at SPRING/BREAK Art Show Los Angeles and New York City in 2020, at Seattle Art Fair with Mindy Soloman Gallery in 2019, and at Andrew Rafacz gallery in Chicago. His work was featured in the #143 Midwest 2020 and #141 MFA Annual 2019 issues of New American Paintings.
Self Portrait as Tanya, 2020
7” x 5” | Acrylic and gouache on yupo paper. Frame, epoxy and acrylic.
Mourning Sunrise, 2020
7” x 5” | Acrylic and gouache on yupo paper. Frame, epoxy and acrylic.
Self Portrait (Pre-Captivity), 2020
7” x 5” | Acrylic and gouache on yupo paper. Frame, epoxy and acrylic.
Me and My Ghoul Friends, 2020
7” x 5” | Acrylic and gouache on yupo paper. Frame, epoxy and acrylic.
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