This Saturday November 8, Copro Gallery invite you to join them in celebrating the opening of three new solo shows. Dave Lebow, Benz and Chang and Owen Smith all celebrate an element of the dramatic in their own ways, exploring moments of tension, vulnerability, and beauty through the medium of paint.
Dave Lebow: ‘Supernatural‘ | Benz And Chang | Owen Smith
Copro Gallery
Bergamot Station Arts Complex, 2525 Michigan Ave, #T5, Santa Monica, CA 90404, United States
Opening Reception: Saturday November 8, 2025, 6:00 – 9:00 pm. Free and open to the public!
Exhibition Dates: November 8 – November 29, 2025
Phone: 310/829-2156
E-mail: Coprogallery@live.com
DAVE LEBOW ‘SUPERNATURAL’
With a masterful hand rooted in academic tradition, Los Angeles based painter Dave Lebow conjures images that feel both timeless and dreamlike, weaving narratives where beauty collides with strangeness, and the everyday world slips into the otherworldly.
In Supernatural, childhood innocence meets looming dread: a young girl encounters a tentacle emerging from a suburban street drain, children are surprised by a colossal fly in a dim garage, and a barefoot girl discovers something glowing beneath the soil. Elsewhere, archetypal figures of myth and allegory take shape – an angel shadows a man in a fedora, a skeleton kneels before a bride, and women in luminous gowns commune with serpents, skulls, and bats.
Though steeped in allegory, Lebow’s paintings are not illustrations of familiar tales; they are fragments of stories untold. Each canvas captures the moment before or after revelation, inviting the viewer to step into the mystery and imagine the rest. His lush brushwork, dramatic lighting, and theatrical compositions recall the great traditions of European painting, yet his subject matter belongs to dreams, folklore, pulp fantasy, and the subconscious.
Supernatural gathers this vision into a body of work that is at once beautiful, eerie, and mesmerizing — a world where the boundaries of myth, dream, and memory dissolve.
BENZ AND CHANG
Benz and Chang believe that the arts make the world a better place through shared experience and mutual understanding. The Benz & Chang paintings are “fake vintage photos” rendered with watercolour and/or walnut ink. They are dreamlike and figurative. Most of the paintings appear to be photos from the early 20th century, and they reward a second or third look with details that can be easy to miss. Figures appear with twins, crowns, wings, ghost limbs, halos, odd lights and shadows. Using this imagery, Benz and Chang explore transformative life experiences such as facing fear, making life-changing decisions, grieving losses, having mystical experiences, or confronting mortality.
I see myself as a channel. My job is to align myself with a larger creative impulse, and also with the painting itself. I must add that I rarely do this perfectly. During the various steps of making a painting, I will “see” something that belongs in the painting, and so I will add it. If the decision-making process breaks down, I consult a Magic 8-Ball for direction. The resulting paintings are dreamlike.
Benz
Benz began having experiences with spirits and hauntings at an early age. These experiences have continued throughout his life. They have fuelled his interest in dreams, ghosts, and clairvoyance from all angles, including the fictional, real, fraudulent, or imagined. Benz grew up in the American Southwest, and now enjoys living in the (haunted) Pacific Northwest. He has an extensive collection of odd photos from the early 20th century. Benz has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Chang is a fictional photography studio partner to Benz. He is a stuffed cat of the stuffed animal variety (not the taxidermy variety). Chang supplies the dark.
OWEN SMITH
Owen Smith is an American Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1964. His award-winning illustrations have appeared in Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Time, Esquire, and the New York Times. He has created 20 covers for The New Yorker and recently illustrated a third book for children. His illustrations for the recording artist Aimee Mann helped win a Grammy for Best Recording Package. Smith designed mosaic murals for a New York City Subway Station and murals and relief sculpture panels for a Hospital in San Francisco. For the past 9 years Owen has been the Chair of the Illustration Program at California College of the Arts.
Owen Smith’s art is influenced by the American Social Realist tradition, Ashcan School painters, and Film Noir. He explores the darker side of society using archetypal figures, dramatic lighting, and exaggerated proportions and poses. The art is about human interaction, isolation, and social constraint. He often depicts laborers, criminals, politicians, and the working class caught in moments of tension. These images can be seen as realistic, surreal, even melodramatic.
About Copro Gallery //
The gallery, located at Bergamot Arts, is divided into two exhibition spaces, sometimes featuring a single artist but often two or three. Large group exhibitions are also featured often in conjunction with outside curators. In following with its original mission, Copro Gallery participates in International Art Fairs and curates outside exhibits to help promote their artists.
