Paul Benney

Paul Benney is a self-taught artist and musician. Paul lived and worked in New York from 1982 to 1988 and now is based in London. His work is in collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, The Brooklyn Museum and National Portrait Gallery, UK.

"This work continues to chart the borderlands of perception that concerned me living in the East Village, NY in the 1980’s. The work digs into the themes of life, death, loss and nostalgia while attempting to affirm the transitory presence of the wholly ineffable.

We are often encouraged today to assume extreme and polarised aesthetic or conceptual positions. In my view, it is vital we attempt to integrate both the sensual world and the cerebral imperatives of the intellect. To separate these things; fact and ­imagination, event and feeling, protagonist and narrator, is to stay on dry land and never put to sea. I speak about the sometimes unspeakable in contemporary art discourse; the current protocols that involve a disavowal of the felt in favour of the conceived. The wrestling with representation to bring it to a relevant position in the discourse. The boundless and pressing struggle to find meaning in the poetry of the everyday, and perhaps more uncomfortably, the rich and fertile soil of pre-modern art and culture as a source of inspiration.

Although I am a primarily a painter, I am polyamorous in my interests and if something is good, it's good. Whether it's an installation, a conceptual work or just a piece of text or music. It's just that, for me, I have found painting to be the medium that has the most breadth and potential to include all that I am thinking about and feeling, a tool to express a deeply ephemeral, immaterial state."

Exhibited at Griffin Gallery in In The End We Are All Alone in March 2016.

BORN

1959

Artist in Residence - Somerset House, London, UK, 2010 – 2014.

(Last updated 19.02.2016)