Ben Schonzeit at Louis K. Meisel Gallery

Imaginary Friends

2 April — 3 May, 2025

As if frozen upon sight in intimate conversation, the imaginary friends of Ben Schonzeit greet you with beady eyes at the exhibition now showing at Louis K. Meisel Gallery. The sculptures, which double as the characters portrayed on canvas, seem to possess individual personalities that translate between materials as one encounters them throughout the gallery. Fragments of found objects are welded, screwed and glued together in alignment with cubist perspectives, with the subjects broken up and meticulously assembled at the very same time. The only trait apparent in all sculptures, is the vague, varied, yet surprisingly consequent shape of a body. Stiff limbs, round joints, and blank faces seem to provide the material with evidence for its claim to personhood.

Ben Schonzeit, *Studio* (2023), acrylic on canvas, 54 x 42 inches. Image courtesy of the Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

In the acrylic paintings of these mute fantasies, the playful use of dramatic arrangements and surreal landscapes make a convincing portrayal of their natural habitat. The imaginary character of the subjects here find root in a dreamlike and empty space, where they seem to protrude as the crystallizations of fleeting thought. In other paintings, such as the 2023 acrylic painting Studio, they are posed proudly in front of a series of Schonzeit’s other paintings, some of which, such as Siracusa and Slouch in Central Park, are shown at the very same exhibition.

Speaking to the artist over facetime a week later, I got a personal tour of this studio, located in his Soho loft. In talking we touched upon many subjects, reflecting his broad field of interest. Most interesting to me, were his own reflections regarding the imagined world depicted in the show. He noted that the sculptures seemed to live more comfortably within the painted world, and even talked of the sculptures wanting to be in paintings. Reflecting on a gallery room showing the works of Constantin Brâncuși at the Museum of Modern Art, he pointed out the importance of a room where the sculptures could “live happily”. Silently gazing at you, Schonzeits sculptures seem to be doing just that. In their silence, the groups of inanimate creatures seem blissfully still, as opposed to abruptly frozen.

© (2025) Ben Schonzeit. Image courtesy of the Louis K. Meisel Gallery.

Influenced by theatre and dance, the exhibition allows for the sculptures to be shown in groups, either on isolated levels within the gallery room, or the group portraits on the wall. The artist comments on their apparent relation to each other, admitting that he “doesn't even know what they are talking about”. Comparing it to the way in which animals live better in company, he allows for the individual characters to coexist in the worlds he creates for them. The viewer is left on the outside, in a role halfway between visitor and spectator, getting a glimpse of a parallel plane.

The abrupt transition between each fragment of the sculpture's bodies, makes each character similar to a collage of broken pieces. Similarly, the sculptures' appearance in the paintings make them subject to an intertextual referencing, borrowing faces, names and bodies in an interwoven story of expression. Schonzeits imaginary friends seem to appear as symbols with a life of their own. Consequently, a universe takes form as one walks through the exhibition, encountering the same character in different ensembles, spaces and forms. The same face greets you several times, both spurring and deflating the question of which portrayals legitimate claim to originality. Time seems irrelevant, as every character appears both sudden and continuous throughout its multiplus depictions.

Schonzeit’s background as a part of the first generation of American photorealists is not the focus of this show, whilst at a gallery central to the movement. Still, works like the aforementioned Studio diffuses the border between accurate depiction and subjective expression. The cast of unusual characters are here portrayed true to nature, while the nature in question is stranger than fiction. Schonzeit informs that he used a photograph as reference for the whole of this painting, making it differ from the invented worlds seen in the background of the other works on canvas. Commenting on the difficulty of deciding on the installation, he calls Studio an introduction to the rest of the show. In entering the gallery, I also perceived the piece to be a mediating force between the immediate materiality of the sculptures, and their ambiguous doubles in the picture plane. A dignity is felt in the way each sculpture's identity carefully translates from found material to brush stroke, leaving you with the subtle sensation of a life within the material.

Though radically different from much of the work from his early career, there's no sudden break dividing his photorealistic still life painting from the 70s from the experimental play of forms that can be seen in this exhibition. A lineage can be traced to the same reaction to postmodern societies' abundance of photographic images. “We lived in a world of media”, the artist says in relation to a question about what drove him to working with photography in the first place. Yet, the newer works of Schonzeit seem to let imagination break the existing aesthetics down into harmless, innocent figures, instead of replicating them with meticulous notice to detail. Pointed out by the artist himself, a curiosity and admiration for the world was what led him to the camera as a tool for interacting with one's surroundings. The imaginary friends present at Louis K. Meisel Gallery through April seem to have sprung out of the same curious attention to the mind as it encounters the observed world. They are like spontaneous reactions to Schonzeits own artistic practice. Sudden and mute, captured in passing, they seem as honest a witness as any still life painting.

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