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# 346 by Max Benjamin

  • Title: # 346
  • Artist: Max Benjamin
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Size: 60"h x 40"w
  • Creation date: 2009
  • Added to collection: 2015
  • Donor: The Bill Rhoades collection, a gift in memory of Murna and Vay Rhoades
  • Campus: Rock Creek
  • Location: B2/2 Hallway gallery

The large 60x40" painting may evoke the dizzying sensation of looking down from an airplane at shapes of land, water, ice or vapor; but Benjamin, though inspired by landscape, refers to his paintings as "completely self-contained visual entities with no direct reference to the visual world." Of a retrospective exhibition of 40 Max Benjamin paintings at Foster White Gallery in 1993, Matthew Kangas wrote; "The oils exude a godlike authority that is both exhilarating and possibly worrying." Indeed, many of Benjamin's paintings evoke the grand scale of nature and a sense of awe and terror sometimes referred to as "The Sublime."