Vigo Gallery is pleased to present SWEETFELLA, a solo exhibition by American artist Ben Crase, coinciding with Frieze Week London. Framed among the visual syntax of the American West, Crase’s paintings create a revisionist vision of frontier masculinity- one softened by memory, colour, humour and kinship.
At the heart of SWEETFELLA lies an imagined world inspired by Butte, Montana, Crase’s hometown. Once a mining boomtown with over 165 bars, Butte offered a patchwork stage for performance, ritual and camaraderie. For Crase, the saloon was never just a backdrop, it was a central hub of daily life. “I was going to the bars with my grandpa when I was five,” he recalls. “He ran a bar snack delivery company with the motto ‘If we ain’t got it, you’re better off without it.’ We’d make our rounds and then sit in the cemetery watching squirrels. The bars were always there.”
Rather than depicting literal history, Crase’s works offer a memory-infused reimagining, a make-believe West where echoes of Butte give rise to a more inclusive mythology. “I started these works as a way to flip the phrase ‘How the West was won’- which I always found troubling- into ‘How the West was lost,’” he explains. “Lost in the sense that we lost something vital when we decimated Indigenous cultures and wiped out the buffalo. There’s so much history we’ve whitewashed.”
Crase’s figures- men in matching flamboyant pink hats- appear in surreal group portraits staged in chandeliers-and-checkers interiors. Rendered in thick oil and pastel, they conjure a dreamlike community of kin: performers, brothers, spirits, selves. They gather not in conquest but in connection. “I almost don’t even think of them as cowboys,” Crase says, “but men of the time, a kind of club, a team spreading love and empathy.”
Each painting blends tenderness with theatricality, blending baroque patterning, rich colour, and unexpected iconography. Grizzly bears and big cats prowl through the compositions as symbols of protection and memory. A piano appears as a quiet tribute to Crase’s late father. Zebra and tiger stripes nod lovingly to his mother’s décor, signifiers of familial affection woven into fantasy interiors.
The recurring motif of the pink hat becomes a symbol of radical acceptance, a badge of individuality and emotional openness in contrast to the toxic masculinity Crase critiques. “To me, the pink hats symbolize equality across the board,” he says. “If we don’t have equality, we’ve got nothing.”
Crase’s imagined bars are spaces where theatre and truth coexist, echo chambers of identity where people come to be seen, but also to disappear. “That mix of performance and community,” he notes, “is what I try to capture. I want people to feel like they belong - like they’re in on the joke, or part of the team.”
And behind the humour, the uncanny twins, the sly dogs, the glittering chandeliers, is something deeper: a meditation on memory, legacy, and how personal history can open space for collective healing. “These paintings are thoughts,” Crase says. “They carry the feeling of Butte- those bars, those friends, those moments of joy. They’re ghost stories of a West that maybe never really existed, but still feels like home.”
SWEETFELLA is both elegy and celebration- a group portrait of misfits and spirits in a Western bar that never was. A place where masculinity is tender, joy is defiant, and everyone wears the pink hat.
