About
Ben Mittleman is an American artist working across painting and sculpture. His practice is rooted in geometry, repetition and material, often combining structured systems with evidence of the hand.
Originally trained in visual communication and having worked for many years as an art director, Mittleman developed an independent studio practice that has moved increasingly toward reduction, materiality and abstraction. His work incorporates raw canvas, graphite, paint, textiles, found and fabricated materials, and stone.
Mittleman has lived and worked in New Mexico and Bali. His recent work extends from intimate, hand-drawn geometric paintings to large-scale outdoor sculpture, exploring the relationship between structure and intuition, order and interruption, and what is left unresolved.
Artist statement
I begin with order.
Grids, repeated forms and geometric structures give me a system to work within. Once that structure is established, the decisions become more intuitive—what to add, what to remove, where to interrupt a pattern and where to leave it alone.
I’m interested in the tension between order and uncertainty, and in what happens when a structure is allowed to remain unresolved. I leave pencil lines visible, work on raw canvas, and allow imperfections and accidents to remain. Empty areas are as important to me as the forms I fill, leaving room for relationships I haven't predetermined.
The work often begins with a desire to make sense of something—pattern, disruption, control, incompleteness—but I don't need the finished piece to resolve it.