Billy Al Bengston (June 7, 1934 – October 8, 2022) was an American visual artist and sculptor who lived and worked in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii.

)[7] In a 2018 article in Vanity Fair, Bengston recalled that he and Irwin hung the 32 pieces in Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup-can paintings show at Ferus in 1962.

[10] According to Grace Glueck of The New York Times, Bengston "was among the first to ditch traditional oil paint on canvas, opting instead for sprayed layers of automobile lacquer on aluminum in soft colors, achieving a highly reflective, translucent surface.

[13] Thomas E. Crow drew attention to the deliberate contrast between Bengston's flamboyant, competitive, aggressively masculine stance and his delicate, modest approach to his art.

In the 1960s, he often painted a single centrally placed flower (as he also did with the chevron), thus upending the widely held notion that putting an object in the center of a canvas should be avoided at all costs.

[16] Bengston's spare compositions and elaborate yet untraditional processes caused some observers to associate him with the Finish Fetish movement, whose practitioners typically created sleek, smooth works.

The artist heightened the effect with unusual textures, as in his well-known "Dentos", works in which the aluminum upon which he created imagery was dented in unpredictable patterns.

During the last few years of his life, he suffered from dementia and was the subject of a Silver Alert in November 2021, but after remembering his phone number was found happily holding court in the lobby of a Marina Del Rey Hotel.