We love an artist who can successfully blur the line between sculpture and painting, and Brooklyn-based Ivin Ballen is certainly no exception. Upon first viewing his work, you perceive a few colored shapes (some rectilinear, others more organic) haphazardly arranged on a vast backdrop. Upon closer inspection, you begin to notice those colored shapes are an assemblage of found materials, and that, in fact, those found materials are simply just painted casts of the originals. Ballen has centered his practice around this kind of painting (or is it actually sculpting?) technique where he creates a relief sculpture out of discarded materials, casts the assemblage, paints the interior of the mold with his chosen pigments, and then casts that to achieve the final result.  He says of his work, “I found that to physically paint around some of these objects turns them into a painted object. I’m more interested in the object being a blue piece of wood — not a piece of wood that’s painted blue.” This unique process allows Ballen the freedom of creating repetitive, sometimes identical paintings where the only change may be the color palette or the composition, giving viewers a similar yet totally different experience with each piece.