Wolf Noam Ben
Ben Wolf Noam was born in Cambridge, MA, in 1987, and received a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. He has exhibited throughout America, Eu- rope and the Middle East.
Though his paintings pay homage to the landscape and art history of Southern California, Ben Wolf Noam developed the process for his signature foliage paintings while on the East Coast. Newly graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, he began pulling ivy from the walls of his Brooklyn home and transposing it onto paintings to signify the struggle between weed and architecture. Nowadays, Noam collects foliage from the Los Angeles River, an ecosystem famously strangled and stunted by concrete. He lays his findings out on a canvas, which he sprays with color gradients that evoke the visual language of digital image making, layering masks so that the flora creates imprints. In his exhibitions, Noam stretches out his two-dimensional images into columns, geodesic domes, and other architectural forms. Noam’s latest work, inspired by the Dadaist tenet of simultaneity, blends his paintings with richly detailed photographs of rush-hour traffic on LA’s freeways.