Zoe Benboow: New Works
Upcoming exhibition
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Overview
Zoe Benbow's paintings are built through colour, pattern and repeated mark-making, each canvas a slow accumulation rather than a single view. Her latest works move between two landscapes — trees drawn on site in Grasmere and on walks across Hampstead Heath, and the Cornish coast around Bedruthan Steps and Rocky Valley — each reworked in the studio over weeks.
Based in the heart of bustling East London, Benbow's studio practice sits in quiet tension with her subject matter. Her oil paintings invite viewers to step away from the urban environment and into a rich, imagined world shaped by memory and place.
Each piece begins with onsite drawings, slowly developed in the studio through a meticulous, layered painting process. Working in oil allows for both time and depth. Through the repeated exploration of familiar motifs, her canvases become meditations on remembered landscapes — internalised terrains shaped by fleeting impressions and prolonged reflection.
Her repeated brushwork and intricate mark-making recall the visual rhythms of Gustav Klimt's landscapes, particularly Birch Forest (1903), where the woodland dissolves into shimmering, patterned abstraction. Like Klimt, Benbow constructs her compositions through accumulative gestures that hover between figuration and abstraction. Her practice also shares affinities with David Hockney's depictions of the Yorkshire countryside — especially in the use of strong colour and compositional layering to immerse the viewer in a felt experience of place. Yet where Hockney captures the immediacy of presence, Benbow's works are filtered through memory, time and introspection — landscapes as much imagined as observed, as seen in Spring Walk (2026).
Zoe Benbow has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, and her work is held in numerous private and public collections. She holds an MA (RCA) from the Royal College of Art, London, where her thesis was awarded Distinction, and a First Class BA (Hons) from Ravensbourne College of Art and Design.
Studio: London, UK
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Works
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