Unseen Terrain: Ella BenAmi at Daniel Raphael Gallery

Ella BenAmi brings her abstract paintings, a collection of works named Unseen Terrain, to the UK for the first time, opening at the Daniel Raphael Gallery in November.

The artist’s idea is that her work gathers around the desire to organise and create a certain kind of distinctiveness and to allude to networks of codes that seem to exist within alternate systems of reality to those that we encounter in our everyday lives. The power of BenAmi’s work is its ability to express the ungraspable, hovering on the peripheries of visualisation but ultimately something we can intuitively understand with our internal senses.The paintings produce a feeling of morphology; forms seeming to coalesce into nebulous splashes of colour. Her Dreamscapes series takes this idea further still, producing works that seem as though solid landscapes are viewed through a pane of frosted glass, a dim outline just beyond comprehension.

Speaking of her work, BenAmi says:
“Psychic life has to occur somewhere.There has to be an arena where all of this drama actually takes place, something I aim to explore in my work. I enter into my painting as though I had already somehow been transported into the metaphysical realm and examine a certain landscape from the inside. Each time anew, I begin to create the particular environment from the language and material that this environment both demands and provides me.”

Ella BenAmi was born and raised in Israel, has lived in India, the United States and is now based in London. She received her MA in Documentary film from Brunel University, London in 2016 and her Fine Art education at the Corcoran College of art in Washington DC.Her work has been shown extensively in the US, including the Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, the Seth Jason Beitler, Miami and the BB contemporary, NewYork.
Ella works primarily as a painter but also creates video installations and sees herself equally as both an Eastern and Western artist, drawing on both philosophical schools of thought and visual traditions.The large format works offer landscapes of unseen reality, influenced in part by her studies in Asian philosophy.

There will be a talk with the artist and Dr Amy Mechowsky, Head of the Learning Academy at theV&A, at Daniel Raphael Gallery on Sunday 12th November at 4.30pm.

Unseen Terrain: Ella BenAmi is at Daniel Raphael Gallery, 26 Church Street, London NW8 8EP

Private View: Thursday 9th November 6.30 – 9.30pm, to attend please RSVP to [email protected]