TRUCK STOP by New York Artist Barton Lidicé Beneš circa 1980
Original work from Barton Lidicé Beneš's Rubber Stamp Art series created in 1980 celebrating gay liberation and promiscuous activities at Truck Stops in the early 1980s before the start of the AIDS epidemic. Beneš had acquired a large collection of rubber stamps which he used to create works on paper.
This is an original Beneš work signed and dated by the artist and acquired from the artist incorporating stamp images with colored ink, glitter and photographic slide cardboard frames.
The work is unframed. It has been stored in an archival box and has not been exposed to light.
Size: 7.5 wide x 11.25 tall x .25 deep. The slide images protrude 3/16 of an inch.
Barton Lidicé Beneš was born in Westwood, New Jersey, in 1942 and studied at the Pratt Institute in New York in the early 1960s. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Cleveland Museum of Art; North Dakota Museum of Art; Katonah Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as internationally at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Boras Konstmuseum, Sweden; and Old Town Hall, Prague. His work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Smithsonian, The U.S. Mint, and the North Dakota Museum of Art.
As an artists and sculpture Beneš worked with materials he called “artifacts of everyday life.” He used the mementos of childhood in his early work and later made sculptures from unconventional materials, including cremation ashes, shells, bodily fluids, currency, relics, celebrity artifacts, and found objects. He often blended political activism, visual poetry, and humorous puns to create provocative pieces that confronted issues he was passionate about, particularly the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. His artwork became an outlet to express his frustrations and feelings as an artist living with HIV.
Barton was a resident of the Westbeth artist complex in New York City’s Greenwich Village. He died of AIDS complications in 2012.