Singular Works and Iterative Suites

Born to Czech-Hungarian parents who journeyed from Israel to America, Benj Čziller discovered his creative voice early—drawn to the interplay of 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, an experience that awakened him to the expressive power of letterforms. This intimate, tactile relationship with typography became foundational to his later work in design and commercial art.

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, mastering the language of commercial communication. Yet beneath this professional success, a parallel practice quietly persisted—a sustained exploration into fine art that existed in the margins, waiting for its moment to emerge fully into the light.

Today, that exploration takes center stage expressed in three distinct voices.

Literature —a body of work comprised mostly as abstracts in a rich tapestry of word fragments, broken imagery, and abstract vestiges of once readable messaging. Using a hybridization of discarded commercial offset lithographic printing papers (aka: make readies), the media combines a fusion of digitally printed, polychromatic prints on canvas with bees wax encaustic on board.

The work is eighty percent abstraction with the occasional representational element entering the picture plane. His exploration extends to digital iteratives as shown as suites, based off the original singular multi-layered impression. These works harken to Warhol’s multiples and Monet’s series, yet using abstraction in place of representational and iconic images.

Gestural — A hybrid digital extension of abstract acrylics on colored papers.

Assemblage —Mixed media comprised of typographic paper discards, old book bindings, weathered papers, ephemera and veneers.