Ben Risk

Ben Risk was born in 1978 in Glasgow, Scotland.  He gained a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Craft (Fine Art) from Manchester Met in 2002. He lives and works in Devon, UK.

The lyrical paintings of British artist Ben Risk are bound to memories, narrating natural and personal histories defined on the surface by lively colour and raw materiality. His reimagined scapes are emotional testaments to the passing of time. They expose what it means to be human.

Recurrently oneiric and unorthodox, Risk’s work always instances reality, either as elaborate, visual chapters informed by what he describes as a “psychological odyssey to an imagined destination” or as simple, fleeting moments captured on paper.

In his 2019 essay Reality by Chance, American professor and art historian Richard Shiff argues that “As one event follows another, we are the products and the causes of chance effects. We live a personal narrative of events we cannot predict”. Risk responds to this assertion with a moving body of work contextualized by a journey to a fictitious island, a place which he describes as “an umbrella for housing chance events, moments or instances that are encountered along the way”. Occurring randomly in urban back alleys, in the street, a house, garden or out at sea, each happening speculatively leads to an end-point imagined by Risk. Yet, despite its implied idealism, he infers that achieving this yearned-for finale remains a chimeric dream.

Accordingly, the scenarios painted by Risk are both gratifying and joyous in their celebration of the world, its colour and form, but speak equitably to its ordinariness and melancholic imperfections. Inspired by an anticipated but abandoned visit to the Scottish Shiant Isles, Knee Deep in the North Sea (2018) references this unfulfilled destiny. Two figures swimming in the sea simultaneously suggest a proximity to one another and to a looming rock island in the background. Amongst illuminated stones in bright blues, golds, yellows and reds, suspended longing for something that ultimately remains unconsummated – attainable only in a parallel universe - is the overriding emotion.

In 2019, Risk was one of several painters selected by international artist Nigel Cooke to feature in Telescope a group exhibition at the former Jerwood Gallery (now Hastings Contemporary) in the British south coast town. Uniting contemporary artists including Rita Ackermann, Flora Yukhnovich, Andrew Cranston, and Geraldine Swayne,

Cooke wrote:

“Leonardo da Vinci famously advised aspiring young painters to look at stains on a wall; Ben Risk’s magical, confounding paintings depend on this principle, weaving images between marks and stains that appear, in the early stages of painting, on the material he uses…”.

Risk works pigment into linen, cotton, panel, cardboard or found book covers. The stained rags used for wiping away excess paint on past works are themselves repurposed as assembled collages, their material surfaces ready to absorb revised visual histories. Making marks rubbed in by hand and brush, Risk layers, pares down and reconstructs images with poignant temporal gestures. Line and detail depicting charming subjects are applied as a subsequent act.

With an aesthetic recalling artists such as Hurvin Anderson, RB Kitaj, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Dove, Risk’s paintings incorporate figurative and abstract motifs into compositions in which symbolic inclusions - plants, trees, birds and animals, cars or a figure of a child – both reanimate the past and capture the present. His themes are never borrowed but drawn from an internal Wunderkammer of intimate experiences.

- Alexia Green