Introduction

Born to Czech-Hungarian parents who journeyed from Israel to America, Benjamin Čziller discovered his creative voice early—drawn to visual art and music, losing himself in drawing and guitar rather than textbooks.

As a teenager in West Los Angeles, he apprenticed as a typesetter for a trophy engraver, awakening to the expressive power of letterforms. This tactile relationship with typography became foundational to his later work.

Throughout his twenties and into a thirty-year career as a brand image art director and designer in Los Angeles, Čziller shaped visual identities for diverse clients. Yet beneath this professional success, a parallel practice quietly persisted—a sustained exploration into fine art that existed in the margins, waiting to emerge fully into the light.

Today, that exploration takes center stage.

MakeReady is a body of work comprised mostly of abstracts—a rich tapestry of word fragments, broken imagery, and vestiges of once-readable messaging. Using discarded commercial offset lithographic printing papers as inspiration, the medium combines digitally printed polychromatic prints with beeswax encaustic on board.

With eighty percent abstraction and occasional representational elements, this exploration extends to digital iterations shown as series based on the original singular multi-layered impression. With a nod to Warhol's multiples and Monet's series, abstraction replaces representational and iconic images.