Ben McLaughlin is one of Britain's most exciting, contemporary artists. He paints cinematic pictures of intimate spaces steeped in ambiguous atmosphere and emotion. These figurative paintings, seductive snapshots of fleeting scenes and incidents, suggest uncertainty and human alienation. He presents everyday subjects dislocated through cropping and strange viewpoints. The titles themselves, drawn from newspapers, the radio, crossword puzzles, book titles and other equally unexpected sources, confront the spectator with conundrums that deepen the sense of foreboding.
The artist's images are voyeuristic views of intimate moments and explore peculiar states of mind. The paintings are at once potentially humorous, poetically mundane and compelling bleak. These unsettling depictions are tangles of the once real and the imperfectly remembered. Employing decidedly traditional techniques, and displaying an accomplished handling of paint and colour with a seemingly effortless assurance, he creates artworks that on the one hand charm and on the other unsettle. These traces of memory are painted in a style that evokes a bygone era, their ambiguous scenarios beautifully executed in muted tones and half-light, summon fleeting glimpses, isolation and existential musings. Ben McLaughlin has always been a collector of images, and he is surrounded in his studio by boxes of found photographs and cuttings, shelves full of books and stacks of magazines. He constantly takes photographs and draws or writes brief descriptions in notebooks. When embarking on a body of work he will trawl through this chaotic archive to extract starting points. Ben McLaughlin says "I think essentially it's a search for balance, all the work is really about time and memory, and I try to make it universal, but as I paint, chance and the weight of geography, solipsism or current events just shape it into a more specific and finite product".
There are eclectic influences and complicated iconography that shape these critically acclaimed works - artistic influences that range from Walter Sickert to Edward Hopper and photographic influences from Edward Steichen to Alfred Steiglitz. Literature and film have an equally strong impact on McLaughlin's art, in particular the works of T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Alfred Hitchcock and Wong Kar-wai, as do the objets trouvés of contemporary culture: half-glimpsed headlines, the overheard conversations, banal tourism and hotel rooms that form a backdrop to our lives. Continually drawn to the enigmatic, the understated and the detached, McLaughlin brings a spontaneity and wit to the seemingly mundane in modern life.
Ben McLaughlin was born in London in 1969. He studied in London and received his BA in Fine Art from Central St. Martin's School of Art in 1993 and later a MA in printmaking from Camberwell College of Art. In 1992 he won first prize from The Falkiners Fine Paper Young Artists Award, he was awarded first prize in the Cohn & Wolfe Young Artist Competition, London and first prize from the Cecil Collins Memorial Award for Drawing, London. In 1994 and in 1996 Ben received first prize for the Médaille d'Honneur de la Ville de Salies-de-Béarn in France. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious Artist's Residency at The Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, USA. Ben's work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the USA.