Lara Sophie Benjamin is a Cypriot artist born in Nicosia, Cyprus in 1987, where she is currently based. She is predominantly a painter who works in oil paints.

The artist draws subject matter from her everyday surroundings and finds a significant resonance in ordinary sights and spaces. She is interested in their experiential nature, subjective and selective readings and the light and the forms created within them.

Benjamin has a deep-rooted connection to her materials and the activity of painting. She works intuitively and sees the process as an unending exploration based on formal and aesthetic qualities and the versatility of paint. Familiar shapes lose their meaning and become part of a modified actuality.

She sees painting as a constant balancing act; a continual push and pull of opposing forces taking place on the canvas. The painter is constructing an image but deconstructing it at the same time. Ideally, an image must hold together, while simultaneously falling apart. She finds ambiguity in an image engaging, therefore weighing information against a lack of it. Moreover, during the process of making, the artist exists somewhere between control and loss of control, knowing and not knowing.

See the artist’s work on display in store until the end of January 2020.