Ib Benoh is a multidisciplinary artist, painter, sculptor, poet, and scholar. Benoh lives and works in Washington, DC.
Biography
Early life and education
Born to parents of Libyan descent, Ibrahim Benoh grew up in Damascus, Syria. As a teen, he began his academic artistic training in sculpture and drawing, attending the Center of Fine Arts of Damascus for eight years. During that time, Benoh participated in yearly group exhibitions held by the art centers of major cities in Syria, including a 1968 group show with one of his sculptures exhibited at the National Museum of Damascus. As a practicing artist, Benoh gained membership at the Damascus Artists Association of Fine Arts in 1971. By the age of twenty, Benoh was on his way to become one of the leading artists in the country, receiving a commission for a 13-meter bas-relief for the city of Damascus, which he completed in 1970. However, shortly after, Benoh left Syria, and became one of the contributors at the department of Unity of Fine and Plastic Arts in the Ministry of Culture in Tripoli, Libya, facilitating for the betterment of Libyan artistic movement. At the same time, Benoh continued participating in major group shows, including the Third Arab Artists Exhibition held in Kuwait, and a group exhibition of Libyan artists in 1973 in Tripoli, Libya. He also took part in the First Arab Biennial in Bagdad, Iraq, in 1974, and won first prize for painting in a 1976 national competition in Libya. Benoh had his first solo show in 1977, an exhibition of his abstract paintings in Rome. All the while, Benoh continued his art studies under Marcello Avenali at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Italy, graduating after four years with a Diploma in Fine Arts in 1977.
In the early 1980s, Benoh produced a series of three-dimensional paintings. Some of this work consisted of acrylic on cut-away strips of rectangular cardboard, which were shown at Betty Parsons Gallery that represented him at the time New York City. Similar work was exhibited in a solo show at William Francis Gallery, Providence, RI, which Kim Clark of The New Paper reviewed in 1981, stating that "Benoh, like the Cubists, is concerned with dimensionality - the timeless conundrum of transforming three dimensions to a two-dimensional surface." The artist "manipulates our perception of different colors so that what looks deep is sometimes shallow, and vice versa." Sculptural quality is also evident in his two-dimensional work that followed. Of Benoh's 1983 exhibition at Tossan-Tossan Gallery - a New York City gallery that represented Benoh at the time - reviewer Claude LeSuer of ArtSpeak supported this notion, saying: An almost sculptural quality is achieved by the way the pinned-down paper swells away from the wall, echoing the curve of painted forms." Benoh articulates this continuum of shifting between dimensions in his doctoral dissertation, An Examination Of The Process of Transforming Two Dimensional Constructions Into Three Dimensional Art Works: "The six projects developed for this study explore spatial effects that take place in two and three-dimensional works in which constant shifting takes place between illusionistic and realistic space."
Current work
A reoccurring concern in Benoh's works is that of empathy and harmony between people, species and the environment. Some of his drawings contain poems in Arabic, incorporated into the design, one of which with the motto, "Don't kill the whales' in several versions in the tail of a representation of the sea mammal." Another of Benoh's one-line ink drawings depicts a hunchback, along with several variations of a poem that say not to blame the hunchback for being a hunchback. And, the artist's paintings, which were shown accompanied by these drawings in his 1978 exhibition, "are expressive of Benoh's philosophy of universal love." In his 2005–2006 painting series, Breaking Boundaries, which were exhibited at the Roberson Museum and Science Center of Binghamton, NY, Benoh depicts a struggle between animal and human forms, alerting to the dehumanization, which results from man-made divisions. This work "was conceived when reflecting on the human tragedies that have befallen the world of late" -as well as "man-made conflicts of humans with their natural environment, with animals, with other humans, and within individuals themselves". Albert Boime described Benoh's End of a World, an anti-war painting in response to the attacks on the twin towers and the violence of war, as a ”colossal panorama” where Benoh's “post-Abstract Expressionist tendencies and Cubistic analysis here correspond to the negative impact of world events”. Boime explained that the artist "insists on salvaging it by reclaiming it symbolically in a creative act". And, Benoh states "As an artist, I do not express my feelings to one part but all-disseminating a bit of this energy to everything I have come to know and beyond".
