OCHI is pleased to participate in the 10^th edition of FOG Design + Art to take place in San Francisco, California from January 18 through 21, 2024, with a Preview Gala on Wednesday, January 17^th. Located on Fort Mason Pier 2 in Booth 604 within FOG’s new FOCUS section—an invitational designed to showcase art by young artists as an integral part of San Francisco's creative ecosystem—OCHI will present new paintings by artist Ben Sanders.

Ben Sanders paints prismatic visions of post-human futures rendered as either vast, eroded earthscapes or sub-atomic views of the base physical interactions that lead to the formation of new worlds. Set within limitless, slick landscapes, Sanders’ Sirens feature colossal, flower-shaped forms accompanied by hovering, planet-sized ‘magnets.’ Infinitesimally zooming in on any detail of a Siren scene—sky, sea, mineral sphere, or even the petal of an organic being—reveals that all the building blocks of life and non-life are in fact equal. As the steward of all matter, Sanders renders his Atoms as radiant shapeshifters able to bend space and time. Together, Sirens and Atoms provide insight into an evolution untethered from human consciousness—existentially liberated from aesthetic and moral qualifiers and constraints.

Having come of age in a Southern California environment that celebrates art in service of a story, mood, or feeling, Sanders borrows from the logic of Hollywood set design while referencing the strategies of analog graphic design and illustration. Sanders’ paintings create drama through form—surprising scale shifts, repeating textures ad infinitum, high-contrast color choice, and gravity-defying compositional alignments all work harmoniously towards an uncanny ambiance, a cinematic eeriness borne of an enigmatic future. In imagining a world beyond the contemporary, Sanders’ eccentric and optimistic scenes circumnavigate the temporality of the present as they speculate on a world beyond humanism, capitalism, dogma, and disillusionment.

Ben Sanders (b. 1989, Arcadia, CA) received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Gagosian, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, and Marta in Los Angeles, CA; Asia Art Center in Beijing, China; Asya Geisberg in New York, NY; Primary Projects in Miami, FL; Carl & Sloan in Portland, OR; LVL3 in Chicago, IL; and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA and Sun Valley, ID. Sanders’s work has been commissioned by esteemed organizations including Nike, Dropbox, Louis Vuitton, and The New York Times and has been featured in publications including ARTnews, Galerie Magazine, LA Weekly, Artillery Magazine, Artsy, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, The Oregonian, Wrap Magazine, and Paper Magazine. Sanders lives and works in Pasadena, CA and is represented by OCHI.