Benjamin Apple
>> Fill the house with concrete << painting | sculpture | room installation The artist from Leipzig Benjamin Appel was born in Germany in 1978 and grew up in Ecuador. From 2000 to 2002 he lived in Santiago de Chile. From 2003 to 2010 he studied painting and graphics at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, with Gerd van Dülmen, Thomas Zipp and Daniel Roth, among others. In 2009 he had his first solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Various exhibitions at home and abroad followed, including the USA, Chile, Ecuador, Switzerland, France and China. In his conceptual paintings, sculptures, videos and text works, Benjamin Appel deals with the rectangle and the resulting right angle. Appel's investigations focus on the interrelationship between people and space. An important theme is the relationship of the subject to reality and how this is influenced by the rectangle. The constructability of a reality in a rectangular space is shown e.g. in a landscape photo, a wall, a carpet, a bed, a door or a concrete slab. In his more recent works with text he is ironically reminiscent of the work of Rachel Whiteread and of outlines and ground plans of spatial three-dimensional objects.
