About The Artist

Ben Aronson is widely regarded as one of America’s foremost painters of the modern city. His paintings—often aligned with the tradition of Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, and Fairfield Porter—are recognized for their evocative portrayal of the contemporary urban landscape. Through a subtle interplay of light, color, and atmosphere, Aronson captures the lived immediacy of a moment within the city.

Blending realism with abstraction, his canvases reinterpret rooftops, avenues, towers, signage, and sidewalks into orchestrations of geometry, motion, and light that crystallize the essence of place. His painterly approach, at once vigorous and restrained, gives rise to a visual language both expressive and precise. “The goal,” Aronson explains, “is not simply a likeness, but the most distilled form of a powerful visual experience.”

His work extends the legacy of modernist city painters, but with a contemporary urgency that reasserts painting’s power to speak viscerally in the age of the digital image. His artistic vision is deeply informed by the atmospheric urban solitude of Edward Hopper, the compositional geometry of Richard Diebenkorn, and the gestural energy of Willem de Kooning—connections reinforced by his direct lineage to the Bay Area Figurative masters through James Weeks, and to the New York School of Abstract Expressionism through Philip Guston.

Often described as a painter of the suspended moment, Aronson isolates quiet intervals within the city’s constant flux. His paintings slow the pulse of the metropolis, offering moments of reflection and stillness amid its relentless movement. Whether depicting New York, Boston, San Francisco, or cities of Europe, Aronson transforms the familiar into images of rare clarity and enduring lyricism.

Born in Boston in 1958, Aronson earned both his BFA and MFA from Boston University. Among his many honors, he received the Hassam Purchase Fund Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. His paintings are held in the permanent collections of more than fifty museums, including the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Academy Museum in New York, the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum in Michigan, the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art in China, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

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