For over 30 years, my work has explored the fabric of cities and architecture, seeking out the overlooked, the lost, the forgotten, and the misplaced. Working primarily in painting and photography – and more recently sculpture – my practice investigates the transient and often contradictory nature of contemporary landscapes.
In this latest series of paintings, tiny sculptural forms and constructions are used as the starting point for the investigation of a painterly space between art, architecture and landscape. Referring back to the ideals and intentions of Constructivist painters, and looking forward to our world today, the resulting small works are intended to suggest monumental forms, teetering, tipping and out of balance.
Situated within an illusory landscape suggesting activity just out of sight, these small and tiny paintings are created through the application of multiple layers of paint – building up intricate and intimate surfaces and textures.
“She makes us look at things we previously have been half-blind to. She reveals the hidden make-up and fabric of significant corners of our environment. She invents new techniques to embody unexplored subjects. She makes us recognise the laws of natural force in the most dramatic of manufactured structures. She makes us see from unprecedented perspectives. She presents images that are so skillfully freed of dogma, or message mongering, or art historical cliché, or easily interpretable illustrated meaning, that they let the viewer’s senses experience the painting’s presence and allow the viewer’s thoughts and imagination to wander away as they will. Finally, Benz enables us to see an unpredictable beauty in what might have been shallowly misconstrued by those with less creative insight as the downright pits of ugliness”
Robert Clark, 2006
(Artist, Writer for The Guardian newspaper and Senior Lecturer, University of Derby)
Robert Clark, 2006
(Artist, Writer for The Guardian newspaper and Senior Lecturer, University of Derby)