Born in Kansas, Bengston migrated to Los Angeles with his family in 1948. At Los Angeles City College he studied under Peter Voulkos, a ceramicist whose iconoclastic approach to art he later cited as an inspiration. Around 1957 he moved from ceramics to painting. Bengston was a member of the ‘Ferus Gang,’ the group of contemporary artists that congregated around, and showed at, the Ferus Gallery, the vanguard gallery of Los Angeles contemporary art in the mid-twentieth century. He held his first solo show at Ferus in 1958. His work, like that of a number of other L.A. artists at the time, reflected the car and surf culture of the city. “My earlier work took off from things I saw in the street: cars, signs … man-made things that we see in harsh California light. And Los Angeles, of course, was and is a car culture … So I used car and sign-painting materials and colors the way an artist would any other kind of color,” he said during an Art in America interview in 1978. His work is characterized by its attention to surface, reflection, and translucency — he is regarded as a pioneer of what became known as the Finish Fetish style — and a decorative use of brand-like symbols. “To me, a picture is just supposed to sit there and be something to look at. You’re never supposed to know what it is. Once you know what it is, it’s something else; a memory.”
