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Artist statement

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Henry Banger Benvenuti: Portraits

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This collection of 35 photo-based portraits spans several decades from 1981 to 2025. The early found images are primitively cut with blades and pasted with glue, while the later images were rendered in photoshop. His primal trajectory parallels technological innovation during this time and currently experiments with artificial intelligence applications in his practice.  Process and subject matter reveal the shifting culture of photographic image making from pop art through punk and image appropriation into current technologies including AI and video.  Thematically, the work embraces the glamourous collective fetishes of beauty, love and violence while delivering psychologically astute and mystical interpretative portraiture. 

  

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Biography

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Henry Banger Benvenuti is an American artist born in 1952 in Pittsburgh, PA currently resides in Toronto, Canada. He was an artist and curator in 1980’s East Village art scene and kept company with the beat poet Gregory Corso and curated the first No Wave Punk exhibition in New York City in 1978 at the Nanson Gallery. He later exhibited with the French fashion designer Agnes b, in Paris, the Agnes b Gallery in Tokyo and the Picasso Museum in Antibes.   His work is in several private collections of actors and artists. He continues to work as a scene painter in the movie business while continuing new directions inpainting with photo-based images with motion and AI collaborations.

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https://henrybangerbenvenuti.com/

 

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