Ben Edmunds was born in Norwich, UK in 1994 and lives and works in London. He graduated from Wimbledon College of Arts in 2016 with a BA in Painting, and from Royal College of Art in 2018 with an MA in Painting, where he won the annual Hine Award for Painting.

Ben’s works are tugged at contemporary manifestations of mythology and systems of belief. His practice is deeply rooted in his background as a sailor and windsurfer, and his work focuses on the crossover between these adventure sports, luxury lifestyle pursuits and color field painting. He is interested in the possibilities of abstraction as a transcendental experience, likening it to climbing a mountain or sailing in open water. His work is chiefly characterized by its combining the “holy”, almost archaic, formal modes of Modernist Abstract Expressionism, color field painting and Minimalism, with the highly stylized and contemporary accents of extreme sports and fashion. Ben is concerned with the materiality and process of painting itself. His abstract works are the final product of a digital process of rearranging and editing forms in an effort to lay bare the space between the many layers that make up an otherwise two-dimensional painting. He positions his paintings to employ a variety of techniques associated with craft and domestic arts, such as tie-dye, embroidery and stenciling within the traditional structures of hard-edged and color field abstraction. The artist expresses his interest in intersections between the high and the low, between painting and graphic design, and between the fake and the real. Thin washes meet sharp graphics, and hazy landscapes meet typography. With considered application, the paint opens up layered spaces akin to the desktop or the stage set.

Ben Edmunds has been shortlisted for the Prunella Clough Scholarship and was a runner up for the East Anglia Schools Portrait Prize. He was featured on Saatchi Art’s 2016 “Top 10 Artists to Invest in” series.