Ben Pranger

Ben Pranger’s sculpture combines organic and architectural elements in hybrid constructions of papier-mâché, plaster, wood, and paint. Moving between organization and chaos, the work often begins with a fragment of a previous work. Blobby masses are built around skeletal structures or scaffolding supports bulbous growths. These contrasting forms operate in tension; pixilated grids emerge from fluid forms like cities colonizing an indeterminate terrain. The sculpture is a kind of failed architecture, where structures, overwhelmed by disaster, collapse under the weight of matter, only to rise again from the ruins to rebuild the city anew. While the sculpture is decidedly low-tech, investigating material-based abstraction, it also imagines future worlds and habitations, suggesting sci-fi, dystopian scenarios.

Ben Pranger has shown his work throughout the U.S., including recent group shows at Curious Matter, Art House Gallery and Drawing Rooms in New Jersey, Artist-Run/ Satellite Show in Miami, Trestle Gallery in New York, and Grizzly Grizzly in Pennsylvania. He participated in artist residencies at John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry program at Kohler Co. (Wisconsin), Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown (Massachusetts), the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program (New York), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He  has also received sculpture grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New Jersey Council for Art.