Benigna Chilla (Hamburg, Germany, 1940) began her studies in Germany at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung in Essen. She studied a broad range of skills, from typesetting to drawing, sculpture and printmaking. Chilla received her “Meisterschüler” in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin in 1968. Chilla emigrated to the United States in 1969, settling in Chatham, NY. Having studied with Bauhaus professors in Germany, Chilla’s initial encounters with Minimalism in America sparked an engagement with principles of planar geometry around 1970; and her intuitive and personal pursuit of form and order would guide her practice for the rest of her career. For practical reasons, Chilla undertook further graduate studies at the State University of New York, Albany and University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the early 1970s. She had access to printing presses but limited resources, and she repurposed fragments of other artists’ discarded plates to create her work. Never interested in editions, Chilla transformed her prints into unique sculptural forms, beginning a decades-long, pioneering exploration of the conversation between two and three-dimensionality in art that continued with her optical paintings on layered screens from the 1980s until the early 2000s. By the 1990s, Chilla began to circulate her observations and theories on the relationship between mathematics and art, publishing in academic journals and presenting her work at conferences globally. In the past decade, Chilla has returned to working principally on large canvases, building her ideas in paint and with remnants of textiles, which she uses both to create texture and as a material adhered to the surface. Increasingly, the artist’s color-block forms, iconometric compositions, and even the scroll-like formats of her work reflect the importance of the time she has spent in Asia to her practice. 

Chilla has held residencies at Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her works can be seen publicly in collections globally including Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf College, MN; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY; University at Albany Fine Art Museum, Albany, NY; Museum Modern Art, Hünfeld, Germany; Negev Museum, Beersheva, Israel; University of Buenos Aires, FADU, Argentina; University Museum of Toluca, Mexico; Oomoto Foundation, Kameoka, Japan. She has had over forty solo exhibitions both in the United States and internationally.

" I like to engage the viewer into my pieces for a certain amount of time in order to experience another dimension. The eye of the viewer is tricked with an impression of perpetual change and motion. And so the viewer sees more than what is actually received by the eye; he will find three-dimensional spaces witin the two-dimensional surfaces. In this sense I offer the viewer a chance for virtual movement through planar geometry."