For up-to-date information, including new drawing works, please visit Ben's website:
http://www.benedictcarpenter.co.uk
Benedict's sculptures have the authority of statements, but they function as questions. Like eggs, they are formally and self-referentially complete, un-hatched, contained and biographically unresolved.
They invite multiple interpretations; they could be birds, buffalos or bugaboos. But they are not disorganised accidents untouched by the shaping mind. The forms are composed to be suggestive but without assuming a fixed and recognisable identity: they are precisely like nothing at all.
Art is a kind of flirtation. It draws the viewer in, exciting interst through beauty, scandal or ugliness. A lot of art is "about" something: poverty, beauty, god, whatever. but Benedict's work is emphatically "about" nothing. Its purpose, if it has one, is fugitive even to its maker. Although its subject is volatile, its operating parameters are easy to define: the work sits between maker and audience, belonging to nobody but itself. It plays on this strange relationship, turning the ground between them into a space where the most peculiar advances can be made.
Some of the drawings are proposals intended to explain how a sculpture might look. Most of them are just images of objects that intersted the artist, exercises after the abstractions of sculpture. A few of them are more complex games - like the terracotta sculpture, they are unmoored from their origins and cast adrift.
"lobster" Ink, Paper 2001
"green frog" Aluminium, 1999
Installation 1999
"Daddy" polyurethane foam flock 2002
"Flocked object", polyurethane foam flock 1999
Untitled paper collage 2001
PUBLIC
COMMISSIONS
2001 Jerwood Sculpture Prize commission for Witley Court
1999 Commission for a sculpture park in up-state New York
AWARDS
2001 Jerwood Sculpture Prize
1999 Shaping
the Future, Remet UK award
1999 The Jean and Eric Cass Centenary Scholarship
SOLO
EXHIBITIONS
2004 PITCH The Queen of Hungary, Norwich
2003 NEW WORK Henry Peacock Gallery, London
2002 SCULPTURE + DRAWING: 2 Malvern Forum, Malvern
2001 SCULPTURE + DRAWING: 1 Henry Peacock Gallery, London
1999 GREEN Mellow Birds, London
SELECTED
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2004 ZOMBIE
Galerie Ferdinand-Ude, Gelsenkirchen, Germany
SCHWANENGESANG
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany
HOPE Christies,
London
London Art
Fair, Space Station Sixty Five, London
2003 REDUCED Century Gallery / Centre of Attention, London
THY NEIGHBOURS' OX Space Station Sixty Five, London
VICE Henry Peacock Gallery, London
DRAWING 100 The Drawing Room, London
SCULPTURE IN THE WILD II Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire
2002 CENTRE OF ATTENTION ART PRIZE The Centre of Attention, London
NEW WORK e1, London
NEW RELIGIOUS ART Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool
NEW RELIGIOUS ART Henry Peacock Gallery, London
JERWOOD SCULPTURE PRIZE Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
2001 JERWOOD SCULPTURE PRIZE Jerwood Space, London
PRESSING FLESH Cambridge Archaeological Museum, Cambridge
KUNST-DARM Henry Peacock Gallery, London
ACTION ON ADDICTION, Sotheby’s, London
2000 BENEDICT CARPENTER, PASCAL DUBOIS, TRINE OLRIK Henry
Peacock Gallery, London
1999 NATURAL DEPENDENCY Jerwood Space, London
CATALOGUES
Richard Cork "Jerwood Sculpture Prize" Jerwood Space 6/11/01
David Barrett "Natural Dependency" Jerwood Space 3/11/99
ARTICLES
Roger Cox "Universal Approval" The Scotsman 19/02/02
Anthony Thorncroft "Universal Praise For Sculptor" FT 21/11/01
Helen Sumpter "Obscure Objects Of Desire" The Big Issue 11/01
Richard Cork "Jerwood Sculpture Prize" The Times 11/11/01
Glynn Williams "Benedict Carpenter" Gallery Magazine 12/00
Neal Brown "Pick of the Galleries" Independent on Sun. 10/9/00
Mark Wilsher "Carpenter, Dubois, Olrik" What's On 13-20/9/00
David Musgrave "Natural Dependency" Art Monthly 5/1/00
Rosanna Negrotti "Natural Dependency" What's On 1-8/12/99
Mark Currah "Benedict Carpenter" Time Out 8/9/99
Marina Benjamin "One Sensation After Another" Evening Standard
5/11/99
Universal object, Bronze 2001
"Beardsley", Bronze 2001