Anthony Benjamin 1931-2002

Click on the individual links above to navigate through the website pages.

Anthony Benjamin, Self Portrait, 1988, pencil and graphite

The artist wrote in a letter to the critic/curator Anthony Fawcett about his piece of sculpture in the 1968 Coventry Cathedral Exhibition:

I find it uncomfortable to talk about my sculpture as ‘Sculpture’, as many of the concerns involved are equally to do with painting or kinetics. I really don’t think of myself as a Sculptor, or as a Painter or Printmaker, but as an Artist, and these categories are simply the necessary, or available medium in which I happen to be working.

Anthony Benjamin

Anthony Benjamin is a polymathic artist in that he is equally expressive as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker. The link between these different media is his personal thesaurus of Sculptor’s Journal: a continuous notebook of source material to which he turns again and again. The basic theme running through all his work is the idea of objects standing in a landscape whose shape intrigues him. Sometimes these objects are realised as three dimensional sculpture in stainless steel, marble, plastics or wood. Sometimes, as in the etchings of 1977 A Sculptor’s Garden, the objects are drawn in a relationship to sky, trees, and paths. As one perception of an object leads you on to the subtly different but linked ideas, so his cones transform themselves into towers, or smoke into flags, or wheels into whirls. One thing leads into another. Like most artists, he returns endlessly to certain ideas, trying a different instrument to draw with, a different eye level, a different juxtaposition with the next idea.

Rosemary Simmons, The Times, 1978

Red Hot Pokers, 1955, oil, an early Benjamin painting