Ben Hunter

Programme

Founded in 2019, Ben Hunter occupies a four-storey townhouse in the heart of St James’s, London. The gallery exhibits artworks of contemporary and historical significance, often in dialogue with loans from private collections and museums. Underpinned by rigorous scholarship and a commitment to exceptional works of art, the gallery situates British artists within an international art historical context. Ben Hunter represents Phoebe Boswell, Clementine Keith-Roach, Tess Jaray, and Christopher Page.
Ben Hunter
44 Duke Street St James’s
London SW1Y 6DD
info@benhunter.gallery
+44 (0) 20 3149 9990

Ben Hunter

Ben Hunter

Forthcoming: TEFAF New York

Ben Hunter

Christopher Page

In vain your image comes to meet me

In vain your image comes to meet me
And does not enter me where I am who only shows it
Turning towards me you can find
On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
Like them my eye is empty and, like them, inhabited
By your absence, which makes them blind.

— from ‘Contre-chant’ in Le Fou d’Elsa (1963) by Louis Aragon

Ben Hunter is delighted to present In vain your image comes to meet me, an exhibition of new paintings by Christopher Page. Across the gallery, Page’s canvases take the form of domestic mirrors—seemingly bevelled and framed—that do not return our reflection. Describing the play of light on cut glass and suggesting enigmatic interiors within, the works behave less like mirrors than screens: surfaces upon which desire is projected, and from which it returns, displaced.

The exhibition takes its title from the surrealist poet Louis Aragon’s Le Fou d’Elsa, later quoted by Jacques Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Here the lover likens himself to a mirror—reflective but blind, inhabited only by the absence of the beloved. In the hands of Lacan, the poem exemplifies ‘the gaze’: an idea that signals not only that we are entangled in the visual, but that our desire distorts what we see. The world looks back at us, particularly where it withholds itself.

What, then, is at stake in looking? Are paintings mirrors, or are mirrors already paintings? Both, after all, promise—but withhold—space beyond their hard surfaces. And what becomes of us, the viewer, when the visual persists without us at its centre? Are we dismayed or relieved to find ourselves absent? What new possibilities emerge when our image fails to meet us? And beyond this, what happens when we realise that the image itself fails? These are after all not mirrors but painted illusions. Ultimately Page’s works, and his writings published alongside the exhibition, propose that a kind of truth—if a negative one—emerges when illusions fall apart.

Ben Hunter

Phoebe Boswell

Ben Hunter is pleased to present an In Focus exhibition of work by Phoebe Boswell. The presentation opens on the occasion of Boswell’s 2026 Art on the Underground commission, we move through scales of blue, which will be unveiled at Notting Hill Gate and Bethnal Green stations on 25 March.

Boswell’s recent work has considered the dichotomy of bodies of water as both repositories of painful historical experience and sites of renewal and hope. Her In Focus exhibition presents three expansive portraits of residents of a coastline that echoes East Africa. The figures are at once engaged with and ambivalent to the crystalline ocean behind them, its powerful presence is at once eternal, unpredictable, sheltering and threatening.

The Saltwater Within Us, also installed as part of the presentation, belongs to a series of oil paintings of intimate, interlocking figures suspended underwater. Upon learning that 95% of Black British adults do not swim, Boswell rented an underwater film studio and invited members of the public to swim with loved ones who do not usually feel safe in water. Through a Black diasporic lens, this body of work critically engages water as a site of liberation, as well as a locus of trauma, thus revealing within it the radical promise of hope.

For her Art on the Underground commission, Boswell invites audiences to consider how we relate to the natural world, even in an urban setting like London. She expands on her thoughts around water, exploring it as a container for resistance, joy, intimacy, release, remembrance, and possibility. we move through scales of blue comprises four photographic tableaus which are installed on panels running adjacent to the escalators at both stations and animated by the viewer travelling up or down the stairs.

London Underground shares its subterranean space beneath the city with a labyrinth of lost rivers and waterways. Boswell’s commission traces the notion of the waterway, evoking aquatic journeys and migratory routes to, from, and within London. Following a public call out to swimming communities around Bethnal Green and Notting Hill, this new artwork builds on her ongoing practice of reclaiming water for Black diasporic communities, and features swimmers who have made London their home, or whose families have historically migrated here.

Further information on the Art on the Underground commission, here.

Ben Hunter

TEFAF Maastricht

Ben Hunter

Bob Law

Bob Law, Kisses and Crosses, is the first in a new series of one-room exhibitions at the gallery. The In Focus:presentations will punctuate the gallery’s exhibition programme, offering an opportunity to highlight a specific artwork or body of work within an artist’s oeuvre. These exhibitions will draw upon the gallery’s specialisms across 20th and 21st century art.

Encompassing the defining motifs of Bob Law’s practice, Kisses and Crosses builds on his earlier radical works to explore philosophical questions around universal understanding. Each painting is constructed through the gradual accumulation of thin colour washes, layered until the surface resolves into an apparently uniform black. Evolving from the Black Paintings(for which Law is best known), this method produces a rich velvet-like surface which, on close viewing, reveals underlying hues modulating from blue to violet. These subtle complexities defy photographic reproduction and invite direct experience.

Law subsequently activated each surface by incising it with a ruler and screw, carefully scratching diagrammatic imagery through the pigment, jaggedly exposing the white paper beneath. The physical act adds a tactile counterpoint to the paintings’ visual restraint. The resulting pared-down, plan-like imagery relates closely to his Field Drawingsof the late 1950s, produced shortly after his move to Cornwall and following formative encounters with Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon.

At the time, Cornwall - particularly St Ives - was a hub for progressive abstract artists seeking distance from the conservatism that still dominated post-war British institutions. The ‘Field’ drawings capture Law’s corporeal and metaphysical contemplation of lying on his back in a Cornish field, often experienced in a heightened state of consciousness. These works map Law’s position in relation to his immediate environment, in his own words: ‘The early Field paintings were about the position of myself on the face of the earth and the environmental conditions around me. These included the position of the stars, sun and moon, and the direction of the wind, and my position in the world in a particular place at a specific time.’1

Structured within a rhomboid frame that represents the perimeter of the field, Law distilled these experiences into a system of graphic, abstract ideograms. Elemental forms and traditional symbols would become foundational to his practice, underpinning a sustained investigation into the radical distillation of visual language. Seminal in their restraint, these works positioned Law as a founding figure of British Minimalism.

St Ives also exposed Law to developments in American abstract art, with artists such as Patrick Heron galvanizing a fervent transatlantic dialogue around modernism. This exchange was further catalysed by landmark exhibitions including The New American Painting, held at Tate in 1959. Artists such as Ad Reinhardt - renowned for his large monochrome canvases and ‘black paintings’ - were well known to members of the St Ives group. Yet Law was among the few British artists to fully embrace hard-line minimalism, setting his work apart from the more gestural tendencies of second-generation St Ives painters.
By the mid-1970s, Minimalism was gaining institutional recognition in the UK. As Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Nicholas Serota championed the movement through a series of groundbreaking exhibitions that introduced British audiences to artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt. Within this international framework, Bob Law’s work was increasingly acknowledged, culminating in a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1978.

Despite these transatlantic connections, Law’s practice remained distinct from that of his American contemporaries. His meditative practice remained rooted in the English landscape and was informed by his wide-ranging interests in Asian philosophy, mysticism, alchemy, and palaeontology. Kisses and Crosses reflects this philosophical engagement with universal forms and the most elementary systems of visual meaning. Shortly after completing the series in 2000, Law described his intention:

‘Kisses and Crosses is a development that surfaces from the field and then castle series of painting [and] drawings with the awareness of gestalt intuition of examining the meanings of the most primitive sign communication, which goes right back to the source of just about everything - even before primitive drawing around a hand. When castles stood upright in their ivory towers or various positions out of the blue a castle had a flag of the most simple meanings. Crosses can mean so many different phenomena, from wrong to right in fact the use of the nought doesn’t mean anything, it is not used in roman numbers. It exists as a real nothing, and we still use this successful system that built so much fantastic architecture and roads.’2

The series informed Law’s only suite of prints, a set of etchings now held in major public collections including Tate, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Falmouth Art Gallery, Falmouth; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

1. Bob Law cited in: Bond, Antony; Melvin, Jo; Lovatt, Anna; Batchelor, David and Panz, Giuseppe, Bob Law: A Retrospective, London, 2009, p.30
2. Bob Law cited in: Bond, Antony; Melvin, Jo; Lovatt, Anna; Batchelor, David and Panz, Giuseppe, Bob Law: A Retrospective, London, 2009, p.208

Ben Hunter

Frieze Masters

Ben Hunter

Tess Jaray

Small Paintings from the Studio

Ben Hunter and Offer Waterman in collaboration with Tess Jaray Studio are delighted to present Tess Jaray, Small Paintings from the Studio.

For more than 60 years, Jaray has developed a singular practice which explores pictorial and architectural space through abstract painting. Born in Vienna in 1937, Jaray came to the United Kingdom in 1938 as part of the flight of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. She studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1950’s. She was invited to return to the Slade in 1968 as the school’s first female lecturer, where she then taught for over thirty years. Her bold, illusory paintings combine a highly distinctive palette with floating, hard-edged motifs which are inspired by her encounters with Italian Renaissance and Middle Eastern architecture. Her compositions hint at the built environment through the isolation and repetition of details and motifs. While her practice touches upon certain aspects of Op Art, Minimalism and Colour Field painting, it resists formal categorisation.

Ben Hunter

44 Duke Street St James’s

Ben Hunter is pleased to present 44 Duke Street St James’s, the inaugural exhibition at our newly expanded gallery. The group exhibition will include 20th and 21st Century artworks from across the gallery's programme.

Frank Auerbach
Phoebe Boswell
Ithell Colquhoun
Nicole Coson
Jared Ginsburg
Tess Jaray
Clementine Keith-Roach
Bob Law
Henry Moore
Christopher Page
Gerhard Richter
Auguste Rodin
Andy Warhol

Ben Hunter

Art Basel | Parcours

P·P·O·W and Ben Hunter are pleased to present works by Clementine Keith-Roach (b. 1984) at Art Basel Parcours, curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director of the Swiss Institute, New York. Fusing the corporeal, decorative, historical, and functional, Keith-Roach creates detailed, uncanny sculptures that blur boundaries between object and figure. The artist’s works often appear both as archaeological artifacts in a state of semi-ruin and as ruins-in-reverse — statues in the process of creation, their cultural significance yet to be ascribed by a society still to emerge. Keith-Roach’s installation at Art Basel Parcours includes a largescale, freestanding sarcophagus and wall-hung relief fragments. An imposing structure, earth mirrored sky mirrored earth, 2023, is cast in plaster and trompe l’oeilpainted to appear as a continuous terracotta surface. This funerary monument is not for a single person but for humanity’s collective body and invites viewers to contemplate our historical present and perilous future.

Ben Hunter

TEFAF New York

Ben Hunter

Clementine Keith-Roach

Nothing that has ever happened is lost

“A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”

— Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Ben Hunter is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures by Clementine Keith-Roach. These works build on the artist’s practice of merging found vessels with casts of body parts using paint to create impossible objects. Time, in her work, is out of joint: the vessels are antique, the body-casts are a snapshot of the present, and the paintwork blurs these temporalities together. They are a strange variant of polychrome sculpture, in which material erosion becomes a kind of impressionist painting. The exhibition comprises six new sculptures that intensify Keith-Roach’s formal language. Hands and arms rush around the vessels, grabbing and dissolving into one another with a new urgency. Each work is a temporal knot that manifests the artist’s persistent interrogation into history and memory, both personal and collective. The title of the exhibition draws from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, a text that enjoins us to imagine history differently from how the victors have written it. Keith-Roach answers Benjamin’s call, imagining an immense unwritten archive of care, toil, touch, gesture. The hands that move along these sculptures—holding, caressing, grabbing, reaching—stand in for the countless anonymous hands that move history, whose labour, while scarcely recorded, is never lost.

“Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.”

— Annie Ernaux, The Years

Ben Hunter

TEFAF Maastricht

Ben Hunter

Frieze Masters

In collaboration with Offer Waterman


For the past 60 years, Tess Jaray has been searching for pattern to make sense of the world. A painter, writer, teacher and designer of public space, she has been guided by a consistent, and unrelenting, questioning of the nature of things: ‘How do you evoke the underlying patterns of life in paintings, without resorting to biological cliches?’ ‘Ambiguity and paradox are constants, but how to give this a sense?’


The answer may be in the unique combination of form, colour, composition, and scale, which are often repeated over a series of canvases developed over months or even years. Infinity - the sense that something can go on and on forever - is not the goal. Change is. Aliveness is. Vitality is. The confirmation that with trial and error, a slight tweak here and an adjustment there, she - and you - might see something anew.


These paintings from 1979 to 1987, first shown in a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988, are among the most important in Jaray’s expansive and singular body of work. They are lessons in sameness and difference that ask you to pay attention to subtleties. Focus on one painting and notice a colour fade, a form reduce in size, a shape shift. Zooming out to view many paintings at once, my eyes become untrustworthy as the optical effects make me blink, step closer, move away and blink again.


Jaray is attentive to landscape and architecture. Her searching for that which is most essential took her around the world, from the landscape of Australia to the mosques of Syria. The titles of these works are mostly based on the physical world of architecture - Minaret, Thirty-One Steps, Green Pyramid - or on the intangible world of rhythms and time - Diversion, Still Point, Time After. The two are inextricably connected in Jaray’s practice, with the concrete, real world of things serving as a mirror to those equally real but ineffable underlying patterns. What is has always been. Look close. You might be transported somewhere else.


-Wells Fray-Smith


Ben Hunter

Phoebe Boswell

Like Hydrogen Like Oxygen

Ben Hunter is thrilled to announce an exhibition of new work by Phoebe Boswell. Drawing its title, Like Hydrogen Like Oxygen, from Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, where Brand expresses that our ancestors, who were never meant to survive, “are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen,” Boswell presents a series of new paintings of intimate, interlocking figures suspended underwater. Through a Black diasporic lens, this body of work critically engages water as a site of trust, recovery, liberation and rebirth, as well as a locus of trauma and violence, thus revealing within it the radical promise of something else.

Upon learning that 95% of Black British adults do not swim, Boswell rented an underwater studio and invited people to bring their loved ones and help each other feel safe in the water. What ensued was a spontaneous choreography of fear, apprehension, courage, nurture and support, as each couple - from parents with their children, to siblings, to lovers - worked together to reclaim the water. In response, Boswell, in her own act of reclamation, chose to return to oil paint after years of stepping away from it. She remarks that: “Painting in oils is a liberatory practice. Paint demands you to surrender to its whim and allow it to do as it wishes, which creates a freedom of mark-making that moves you somehow towards abstraction.”

Water need not be representationally defined. Light, shadow, and the playful ripples formed by movement become patterns of brushstrokes on the canvas, and the artist frees herself from the constraints of figuration. The works do, of course, sit unequivocally within the rich lineage of British figurative painting; the tender compositions of Michael Andrews, the intimacy of Claudette Johnson's portraits, the fleshy forms of Jenny Saville’s subjects, Paula Rego’s raw, representational pastels, and the rigorous, poetic inquiry of Lubaina Himid. Boswell’s figures float weightlessly on the canvas. The sense of both weightlessness and grasping that Boswell ignites is at once palpable and effortless; these paintings navigate the tension between the sense of freedom, safety, fear and chaos that water can summon.

The exhibition reflects on the long history of cultural associations with bodies of water. It considers how water can be a repository for painful historical and contemporary experience - from the horrors of the The Middle Passage to the fated journeys of small boats off European coastlines - as well as a remedial site for radical love, for tender healing, for imagination, and for hope.

Born in Kenya, of British and Kenyan heritage, brought up in the Arabian Gulf and currently living and working in London, Boswell’s practice - which moves across media from drawing and painting, to film, video, sound, and writing - uses auto/biographical stories as catalysts to contest histories, traverse geographies and ecologies, and imagine futurity.

Her work is held in public collections globally, including The British Museum, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), USA; RISD Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA; The British Film Institute’s National Archive, Berkhamsted, UK; the Government Art Collection, London; and The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds (acquired by Contemporary Art Society). She was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, and was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer-in-residence. In 2022, she participated in the Lyon Biennial with a major installation entitled Dwelling.

Her work was included in Soulscapes at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2024 and Rites of Passage at Gagosian, London, 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include A Tree Says (In These Boughs The World Rustles), Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, UK and Liminal Beach, Wentrup Gallery, Berlin. Boswell’s writing was recently published in Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World (Knopf Canada, 2024).

Ben Hunter

The Armory Show

Ben Hunter

Ithell Colquhoun

Elemental

Ben Hunter is pleased to present Elemental, a solo exhibition of work by Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988). Colquhoun was a British painter and writer whose significant contributions to 20th Century art are rooted in surrealism, automatism, occultism, and esoteric philosophy. In 2019, her archive of more than 5000 works was acquired by the Tate.

Elemental presents an overview of Colquhoun’s practice, placing emphasis on the breadth of her oeuvre and the continuity of her ideas across her artistic career. The exhibition will incorporate major works illustrating her engagement with diverse art historical periods, Celtic Revivalism, queer subcultures, and her exceptional exploration of different creative techniques.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring newly commissioned essays by Dr. Richard Shillitoe and Jacqui McIntosh, two leading scholars on Colquhoun’s work. The exhibition will open to coincide with London Gallery Weekend.

Ben Hunter

Jared Ginsburg

Paintings

Ben Hunter is delighted to present Paintings, Jared Ginsburg’s first solo project with the gallery. The exhibition introduces a series of new works that utilise a variety of processes, which both inform and respond to the diverse nature of Ginsburg’s wider practice.

Whilst at work, the artist records his reflections, notations, and memories onto the canvas. These notations, sometimes profound but also mundane, are built up in layers, the details of which are promptly concealed or erased. Ginsburg feels at ease marking the surface in this way, knowing everything can be sufficiently hidden or destroyed, and sometimes, even forgotten.

Jared Ginsburg was born in 1985 in Cape Town where he currently lives and works. His work is included in several prominent private and institutional collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town; Rennie Museum, Vancouver; and Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo. Recent solo exhibitions include objects move across a room at blank projects, Cape Town, South Africa (2023) and All my love at Blue Projects, London (2022). He has been included in group exhibitions at Gregor Podnar, Vienna, Austria (2023), blank projects, Cape Town (2023), Tokonoma, Kassel, Germany (2022), AVA Gallery, Cape Town (2021), Stevenson, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2021), A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town (2018), Emily Harvey Foundation, New York (2016), and Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, Italy (2015). In 2018, Ginsburg participated in the Idris Naim residency in Oaxaca, Mexico, culminating in the group exhibition Hacer Noche.

Ben Hunter

TEFAF Maastricht

Ben Hunter

AUERBACH, HAMANA, HEPWORTH, PAGE, SASRAKU

Ben Hunter is pleased to present Auerbach, Hamana, Hepworth, Page, Sasraku. The works included in the exhibition span more than seventy years and are united by overlapping formal and conceptual characteristics.

Frank Auerbach’s reworked portrait of Julia counterbalances the single, confident line which Barbara Hepworth employs to describe her subject, however both artworks foster a sense of immediacy in their execution. The artist’s hand is equally evident in Kazunori Hamana’s characteristically irregular vessels which are unglazed, finger-printed, cracked and fissured. After they are fired, Hamana places the vessels outside of his studio to allow the natural elements to mark and transform them. Similarly, Tanoa Sasraku forages pigments and uses natural materials to create works which reference place and memory. Christopher Page’s reflectionless mirror opens up a void echoing Hamana’s vessels which punctuate each room of the exhibition.

All of the works in the exhibition are examples of the artists’ repetitive investigation of their subject: the sitter, the vessel, Terratypes, the mirror.

Ben Hunter

Nicole Coson

Undercurrents

Undercurrents is the second solo exhibition at Ben Hunter by London-based Filipino artist Nicole Coson. The exhibition comprises a new series of paintings and an installation which engage with diaspora, temporality and becoming. For Coson, who left Manila to pursue her fine art studies at Central Saint Martins and The Royal College of Art, this new body of work articulates a sense of exploration and globalisation, reflective of her own desire to establish a sense of belonging from within her migratory experience.

A series of large-scale works on linen are central to the exhibition. Through an intricate process devised by Coson combining conventional print-making techniques, her own body, and strategies of indexical mark-making, she translates the modularity of industrial grade food crates, used for the transportation and storge of food in and around East London, onto large sheets of delicate handwoven linen. This process results in monochrome sequences of tightly stacked rectangular forms; gestural swathes of paint delineate the groves and ridges of the subject. The impressed images reveal the crates’ visual indexes of stark geometric shapes, invoking the Bauhaus architectural tradition that sought to reconcile materiality, design and utility to address cultural and societal shifts. Yet there is a poetic elegance at play too. Wide, sweeping brushstrokes are legible beneath a grid-like structure which, in turn, slips in to a vast, organic pattern.

Upon contemplating the crates’ original purpose as vessels for food, Coson references Ursula Le Guin’s 1986 landmark text, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’. Le Guin argues for communal cultivation by privileging the carrier bags in which objects are held and brought to homes, ‘home being another… kind of pouch… a container for people’. That these crates signify the movement of produce to London, reflects the artist’s interest in the journey sustenance (and culture) takes through complex networks of global export and import. Coson asserts that she has always sought to create – or perhaps return – home through food.

Take as an example Untitled, a series of 12 suspendedlines in which aluminium-cast Aklan oyster shells are threaded between interlocking metal loops. In Aklan, a Visayan province in the Philippines, these molluscs are cultivated on seaside farms using a hanging method that similarly affixes strings of multiple oysters to grids of bamboo that then dangle beneath the oceanic surface; as they age, the traces of aquatic and temporal difference in the undercurrent are captured and revealed by the rings in their shells. Here, Coson pays homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Light String series of hanging lightbulbs. The cast shells similarly invoke the passage of time, observing the influence of external changes around the oyster that in turn transform the object.

Within Coson’s practice is a fixation with seriality that seems to allude to Deleuzian repetition – a concept that involves a state of constant becoming informed by difference: each repeated element within her paintings and installations reveals slight idiosyncrasies derived from the process of their creation. Though in previous bodies of work Coson employed a process of mechanical reproduction with her etching press, this new series of paintings relies on Coson’s physical gestures that are left in painterly traces on the linen. By introducing her corporeality into these works, Coson provokes further ontological queries that, considered against Le Guin’s Carrier Bag theory, become preoccupied with home building, sharing and togetherness, wherever one might be. As Le Guin writes, to use carrier bags is to be human, ‘Fully, freely, gladly’.

- Marv Recinto

Ben Hunter

Clementine Keith-Roach & Christopher Page

Earth Sky Body Ruins

Ben Hunter is pleased to present Earth Sky Body Ruins, the first collaborative exhibition by Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page at the gallery. The two artists are embarking on a project to think aesthetically and conceptually about the destruction of old worlds and the possibility of new worlds emerging from the ruins. Pairing an architectural-scale ruin painting by Page with a large-scale funerary sculpture by Keith-Roach, the exhibition is a richly articulated hallucination of a crumbling world, that also tenderly suggests the possibility of collective rebuilding.

Ben Hunter

The Armory Show

Ben Hunter

Natalia Romik

Hand and Trapdoor

Ben Hunter is delighted to present Natalia Romik’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The exhibition comprises two sculptures: Trapdoor (Zhovkva), a work recently presented at Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw and TRAFO, Szczecin in Poland in 2022, and Jad, a nomadic sculpture created as a vehicle for urban protest.

Trapdoor (Zhovkva), is an artistic tribute to survival architecture, a hiding place built and used by Jews during the Holocaust. It is a cast sculpture of the entry point to a hideout lifted from panels in a parquet floor in Zhovkva, present day Ukraine. The sculptural form is presented alongside results of extensive interdisciplinary research carried out by Romik alongside a team of anthropologists, historians, archaeologists and urban explorers with the aim to uncover, map and archive examples of Jewish survival architecture. The project pays tribute to the daily toil of those in hiding and those who provided hiding places, their creativity, solidarity, and will to live, often overlooked in the tradition of heroic commemorations. It reflects on fundamental problems of architecture and social coexistence, such as the relationship between form and function or the design and use of space.

The second monumental sculpture, Jad, is a nomadic machine clad in mirrors, shaped as a hand with a pointing finger. It is a tool for architectural protest and urban memory. The form of this sculpture is inspired by the Jewish liturgical instrument Yad, a hand-shaped pointer used to read the Torah. In 2012, Romik transported the sculpture to places of architectural decay in Silesian Metropolis, condemning contemporary urban management which sees derelict and historically Jewish architecture destroyed or forgotten.Jad was deployed to call attention to erased architectural memory.

The exhibition foregrounds the idea of visibility; Jad is clad in reflective material which aims to mirror and therefore magnify the urban erosion it is calling attention to, whilst also creating an illusion of disappearing. Trapdoor (Zhovkva) plays with visibility as an essential property of its architectural form; it must remain invisible to the unauthorised eye. Romik takes the tragic history of the Holocaust as a starting point for a universal reflection on methods of survival in situations of existential threat. Her sculptures elegantly open a dialogue about commemoration, memory, migration, loss and architectural creativity. They ruminate more broadly on the cognitive potential of architecture and art, reflecting upon the way in which community is established in situations of threat.

Ben Hunter

TEFAF Maastricht

Ben Hunter

Jeffrey Stuker

Next Year in Monte Carlo

Ben Hunter is delighted to present Jeffrey Stuker’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition features a digitally rendered film, Mimicry and the Monte Carlo Predator, following its presentation at the Hammer Museum, LA in 2021. The film mirrors a large-format print of a computer-generated image of Common Mime butterflies in the adjacent room. The exhibition explores Stuker’s natural-historical and aesthetic interests in mimicry. What initially appears to be an exhibition of traditional lens-based media, is in fact an exhibition of digitally constructed imagery, produced by the artist from scratch. There is no camera, no lens, and no captured subject involved in the making of these works. Rather, the subject here is the lure of the image-making process itself, which can not only manifest deceptive representations of reality, but also, as the animal kingdom shows, play a trick that forestalls death.
The Papilio clytia dissimilis, or Common Mime butterfly, serves as a good example of this phenomenon. As a Batesian mimic, this harmless species has evolved to imitate the warning signs of a highly toxic species in its biome. A large-format print of the butterflies captures a moment of stillness in absolute clarity, the creatures’ delicate legs gently poised on sand so detailed one can discern individual grains. This butterfly has developed markings and flight patterns that simulate those of theEuploea core, a species unpalatable to predators due to their consumption of the poisonous plants in the apocynaceae family. Poisonous and thus protected, the Euploea, which, for example has the luxury of flying in a leisurely manner, still finds itself in the mouth of confused predators. Thanks to its mimic, the species that should need neither mimicry nor camouflage, the Euploea core, has had to resort to mimicry. These two species of butterfly form the basis of Stuker’s film, Mimicry and the Monte Carlo Predator, which, in a parallel mimetic impulse, has been digitally modeled and painted by the artist, tempting the eye into consuming it as captured footage.

In the film, the purported camera unhurriedly observes the two nearly identical butterfly species through a negative magnifier on a film strip, or in a neat entomological display. Long pans slowly reveal details from the edge of the frame that synch up with––and fall away from––natural, historical, and technological histories recounted by voiceover. Each is a tale of calculated deception: Xenophon’s army, known for their skill to evade capture, are poisoned by honeycomb laced with the toxic oleander plant; the prospects and dangers of the Papilio clytia and Euploea Core; and research simulating the eating habits of their predator, the Kingfisher bird, using the Monte Carlo Equation by means of a computer.

The Monte Carlo Equation is enlisted by Stuker to simulate the physics of light as it renders his meticulously textured and modeled animations. Because the veracity of the historical accounts his film tells is illuminated by means of simulation, the problem of distinction is given new density. Without a single apocryphal utterance, the border between individual and environment, consumption and resistance, and even the real and the imaginary, begins to dissolve.

Jeffrey Stuker was born in Colorado in 1979. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Stuker will be included in Pacific Strandard Time at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Diego in 2024. Recent exhibitions include Plates from a Defoliated Monograph, Fulcrum Press, Los Angeles, 2023; Throughline, Bureau, Los Angeles, 2023; Objects of Desire, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022; Made in LA, The Hammer Museum and The Huntington Garden, Museum and Library, Los Angeles, 2020-2021; International Biennial of Photography, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography: Thessaloniki, Greece, 2021-22. He received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA from Yale University, where he also taught from 2006 to 2013. Stuker is currently a co-editor of the journal Effects and a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego.

Ben Hunter

RODIN, MOORE, WHITEREAD, KEITH-ROACH

Ben Hunter is pleased to present an exhibition comprised of sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Rachel Whiteread and Clementine Keith-Roach. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Dr Jennifer Sliwka.

The artworks, which span over a century, are united by their depictions of the human form – rendered in plaster or terracotta – conjuring images of bodies, limbs, hands and torsos.

Art historical references abound, alongside more intimate themes – of maternal (and familial) love and labour, religion, and the relationship between found objects and their handmade counterparts. The works offer an invitation to consider the nuances which distinguish cast and modelled objects even on a small scale – and feel the subtle tension between works which disguise their process of manufacture and those that reveal it.

Ben Hunter

Soojin Kang

Landscape

Ben Hunter is pleased to present Landscape, a solo exhibition by Soojin Kang.

The two rooms in the gallery are each occupied by a single monumental textile sculpture, Untitled ,2022 and The Sea, 2022.

The sculptures employ idiosyncratic weaving techniques, using raw silk which Kang hand-dyes herself. They grow into complex systems of interlinked forms, at once recalling the shifting topography of a landscape and the seas undulations; their scale both emerging from and overwhelming the human body.

In its obsessiveness and repetition, the weaving process lends a structure and space for contemplation. For Kang, making is an extension of thinking.

Ben Hunter

Mimicries

Ben Hunter is pleased to present Mimicries, a group exhibition curated by Jan Tumlir and Jeffrey Stuker, featuring works by Hedi El Kholti, Victoria Gitman, Arthur Jafa, Clementine Keith-Roach, Louise Lawler, Lynne Marsh, Nicolas G. Miller, Christopher Page, Jeffrey Stuker, and Jeff Wall.


The curators were initially drawn together by their shared fascination with the writings of the dissident-surrealist Roger Caillois, in particular those concerned with mimicry. In 2019, they entered into an intensive conversation on the subject that resulted, first, in a seminar held at The Public School in LA’s Chinatown, and second, in their co-editing of the journal Effects Number 3: Mimicries. This exhibition responds to those precedents, both of which were conducted within a more or less academic context, from an aesthetic standpoint.


The opening of the exhibition on June 9th will coincide with the launch of Effects Number 3: Mimicriesat the gallery

Ben Hunter

SPRING

Ben Hunter is pleased to present SPRING, an exhibition of works by Nicole Coson, Barbara Hepworth, Kim Lim, Bridget Riley and Rachel Whiteread.


The exhibition, which takes its name from the title of Kim Lim's folded paper series from 1996, will be the inaugural show in the gallery's newly expanded space. The works on display span almost a century and are drawn together through overlapping formal and conceptual characteristics.


For Coson and Whiteread, who make facsimiles of objects, distancing them from the originals, abstraction is an endlessly generative process. Similarly, Kim Lim, Riley, and Hepworth, employ techniques of formal distillation, pushing and reengaging with traditions of Modernism.


Ben Hunter

British Drawings & Works on Paper

Ben Hunter is pleased to present British Drawings & Works on Paper, an exhibition of British artists from the mid 19th Century to the present day. Beginning with Samuel Palmer's The Windmill (1851), an example of the artist's mature depictions of the English countryside, and concluding with Lubaina Himid's Near Neighbours, 1998, made during her residency at Tate St. Ives.


Works by Frank Auerbach, Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Bob Law, Richard Long, Marlow Moss and Alfred Wallis are also included, juxtaposing a range of styles, techniques and approaches to image making.


Ben Hunter

Christopher Page

Shadows & Reflections

In Shadows & Reflections, Christopher Page deepens his investigations into the effects of light on surfaces and the dialogue between pictorial and architectural space. He conjures a psychologically and philosophically charged exhibition through a dyadic suite of paintings, comprising unnervingly blank 'mirrors' on the one hand, and colourful paintings of framed 'paintings' on the other.

Both series are illusions-entirely flat, oil-painted canvases masquerading as joinery, glass, passe-partout, light and shadow. And yet, these paintings are not trompe l'oeil in the traditional sense. These are hard-edged compositions of 'colour fields' that look as much to Modernist abstraction as they do to Baroque illusion. In Page's hands this combination has a distinctly digital air.

The admixture of abstraction and trompe l'oeil on a single canvas borders on the paradoxical. While trompe l'oeil paintings are of interest precisely because they deny their true surface, masquerading as things which they are not-a fine wooden panel with objects pinned to it, say-Modernist abstractions, by and large, wish to be seen for exactly what they are, namely paint on a surface. And yet, in marrying these strange bedfellows, Page exposes some deep affinities between them. They are both self-reflexive modes of painting (they are paintings about painting), they are life-size and 'in the room' and they both engage the body of the beholder in space as much as the eye and the mind.

Page's paintings are both 'in the room' and strangely absent. In the illusory sheen of a mirror, are we looking at a surface that is close to us, or through the surface into deep pictorial space? Perhaps both, or neither. The gestural 'paintings' floating within the phantom frames are in fact painted, gesturally, whilst simultaneously being set back within a virtual space that calls their facticity into question. They are both fact and fiction. It is in this undecidability, in the visual and ontological slippage, that the power of Page's work resides.

While highly conscious of art history, Page's work is ultimately oriented towards the world we inhabit today. His paintings help us to refocus our attention on our everyday visual landscape, where artifice abounds and the legacy of Modernism repeatedly collapses into tromp l'oeil deceptions. This is no more evident than on the screens of our computers and smartphones, whose design language is at pains to appear rational and Modern, whilst also being gilded with the Baroque illusions of virtual depth, false textures, shadows and reflections.


For if Modernist abstraction attempted to make us see the paint for what it is-not look through it, but at it-what does it mean to now reframe this kind of painting within a new illusion? If much Modernist painting was tethered to a wider architectural and political project that hoped to dispense with the illusions of tradition and build society anew on rational grounds, might Page's paintings be seen as a lament at Modernism's failure and subsequent perversion, and at our own acquiescence to the new illusions of a pseudo-Modern world?

Ben Hunter

Clementine Keith-Roach

Mythemes

“It would seem that mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments.” – Franz Boas

Ancient sculptures, archaeological fragments, scraps of text that have survived the gnawing tooth of time, whisper to us in a foreign tongue. They gesture cryptically towards beliefs and rituals that seem alien to us moderns, but more than that, towards whole architectures of thought that we can never fully reconstruct. We are led to believe that these old “mythological worlds” are childlike, and that we are grown-ups who no longer live in myth, who see the world as it is. But what if our own architectures of thought are themselves mythological worlds built from the fragments of the old?

Clementine Keith-Roach’s new sculptures—archaeological artefacts of the present—themselves gesture cryptically towards mythological worlds. We witness hands, arms, torsos, legs, bearing the weight of heavy terracotta vessels—limbs that are identifiably female, and vessels traditionally associated with domesticity. What appear to be the wounds inflicted by time’s tooth might also be read as the lashes of labour. But along with toil we feel a distinct tenderness at work—gentle caresses between entangled hands that share the burdens.

These gentle caryatids, tender sphinxes, are not the ancient gods and goddesses that loom over us mortals, personifications of forces that cohere into a pantheon. Always and already fragmentary, Clementine’s sculptures are not myths but mythemes: assemblages of part-objects, shards of myth. Lévi-Strauss described mythemes as the composite units of narrative—the king is killed, deluge comes etc.—that move through time, appearing in different configurations, new mythological assemblages under new social and theological conditions. In this exhibition we find echoes of ancient Egypt and Greece, we glimpse the Lactating Madonna, the Deposition of Christ, as well as gestures of labour, strife, mourning and care that span time and place. In the wall-mounted relief the sense of assemblage is most formally manifest, the fragmented figure held up by a multiplicity of hands against a surface studded with remnants from her studio—her own spolia, repurposed and reconfigured.

Clementine’s new ruins do a dance with time. The terracotta vessels she finds are old, used, and bear the scars of that use. The limbs that support them are new casts of the artist’s body, immaculately painted to match the patina of the urns they bear. For her, this act of mimicry opens a dialogue between the present and the past. For me, this dialogue speaks to a more general anachronism of our time, namely the obsession with old ruins—ruinenlust in German—in societies premised on the endless production of the new. Why do we revere ruins today? Is it simply because of the historical information they carry, or do these ghosts that haunt our world remind us that other worlds have existed, and offer us hope that others still might emerge in the future?

Towards the end of the 20th Century, it was said that we lived at the end of history. That was our myth: the myth of the finality and perfection of a world order built on individualism and competition. With ecological disaster looming, that mythological world is beginning to crumble. What will we build from the ruins? What bit-parts, what mythemes will remain useful in the composition of the new mythological assemblage yet to be built? These sculptures whisper to us to keep hold of those fragments of collectivity that lie scattered around us.

Text by Christopher Page, 2021

Ben Hunter

Frieze New York

Ben Hunter

Nicole Coson

Fortress

Ben Hunter is pleased to present Fortress, a solo exhibition of work by London-based, Filipino artist Nicole Coson. Exploring the liminal space between presence and absence, the authority of the singular object and the possibility of ‘the multiple image’, Coson’s work oscillates between conflating and conflicting realms as well as the economies of visibility and disappearance.

Employing the monotype printing process, this series of unique, monochromatic paintings chronicle the gradual breakdown of a single Venetian blind. Each slat is individually painted and then rolled under the press until the blind’s form is imprinted onto the surface of the linen. Through repeated pressing, the metal blades eventually weaken and begin to deteriorate; the rhythmically meditative horizontal bands of the slats unravel from their tightly rigorous pattern, buckling, and overlapping until voids and cracks appear in their once impenetrable armour, revealing the intrinsic tension between machine and medium. The result is the impression of a presence that is at once there, yet also ultimately inaccessible.

The objects, once defined by their relationship to the everyday ritual of opening and closing, obscuring light or view, are captured and suspended in time, irreversibly caught in a tangle of their own fragility. The strings that race along the vertebrae of the blinds serve as a glimpse into the object’s previous life and function. Transferring these razor-sharp edges onto soft linen grounds them in a renewed materiality. Once hung, the works form a place of meditation and quiet, which captures both the escapist and entrapping aspects of solitude.

Ben Hunter

Sarah Ball

Portraits

Ben Hunter is pleased to present Portraits, a solo presentation of recent paintings by British artist Sarah Ball (b.1965), the inaugural exhibition in the gallery’s new space at 44 Duke Street St James’s.


Ball draws on a range of found source materials in order to create her meticulously rendered portraits; for this particular suite of works she has gathered imagery collected from social media platforms. Carefully selecting subjects with ambiguous narratives, Ball’s intimate portraits are set starkly against muted backgrounds. Key features are captured with intensity; deep pooling eyes are set against smooth, luminescent skin, while distinctive accessories are set against areas of flatly rendered colour.

The resulting images — strangers recontextualised from the blank void of social media — challenge us to rethink our increasingly digital lives and encouraging us to revel in the eternal immediacy of painting.

Ben Hunter

Frieze New York

Ben Hunter

Masterpiece