Ben Ashton

Ben Ashton is a British Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1983. Ashton's work was featured in several exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Roq La Rue and the Arcadia Contemporary. In MutualArt’s artist press archive, Ben Ashton is featured in The Top Seven Things to See at the February 2020 Capitol Hill Art Walk, a piece from The Stranger in 2020.

Ben Ashton was constantly surrounded by art from a very young age; his father is an artist and his mother was an art teacher. He was always taken to exhibitions while growing up, and now he uses museums play as spaces to meditate within and to figure out my direction in life. Ashton finished his BA at Newcastle University in 2006 and then completed his MA at the Slade in 2008. Half way through his BA, he started to self-teach how to paint from books. He stared in front of paintings in museums for hours looking to figure out the layering techniques; then by trial and error he ended up with his own style.

Ben Ashton see the history of art as an index from which he can borrow, depending on what’s going on in contemporary life. His work at the moment focus on the Regency era and the birth of the British empire, a period of time that spawned a huge amount of self-congratulatory portraiture which now lines the walls of our museums and institutions. Britain is obsessed with its own history and how influential it used to be; British view their history with rose-tinted glasses, remembering their perceived victories whilst overlooking their various misdemeanors. Nationalism has been stoked recently by representing the past as something British should be moving back to, often painting a distorted picture of a greatness that never was. In his current work, Ben Ashton takes these confident Regency poses and subvert and disrupt them, taking a ‘strong and stable‘ part of its heritage and making it unsafe and tainted.

Courtesy of Robert Fontaine Gallery