Trudy Benson

Trudy Benson is an abstract painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Trudy Benson was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1985. She received an MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY in 2010 and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. She is represented by Lyles & King, New York; Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva; and Ceysson & Bénétière, Luxembourg and France.

Benson is known for her large scale abstract paintings that utilize large swaths and globs of paint. Her style was influenced by early computer painting programs, such as MacPaint and Windows Paint. Painting movements that have been attached to Benson's work include abstract illusionism and Post-War New York Abstraction. Related painters include Hans Hoffman, Jonathan Lasker, Al Held, Keltie Ferris.

In December 2012, Scott Indrisek wrote for Modern Painters that, "This young Pratt-educated painter is moving away from her previous cartoonishly figurative efforts and toward a maximalist abstraction. The effect is a bit like a 1980s geometry textbook spazzing out and exploding on the wall. Benson works within a deliciously caffeinated language of gestures and shapes-the smear, the dripping line, rainbows, grids, circles-to create compositions that pair smooth, glossy sections with paint applied so thickly it resembles Play-Doh."

In May 2013, New York Times Art Critic Karen Rosenberg lauded Benson's paintings at the Lower East Side's Horton Gallery (now Sean Horton Presents in Dallas Texas). In her review, she wrote that her canvases resemble the proportions of early mac computers, and "mimic the squiggly, uncontrollable lines and seemingly miraculous instant color-fills of 1980s graphics programs like MacPaint." She went on to conclude, "There is a deliberate heaviness to her work, an impasto that no screen can yet evoke."

"Shapes of Things" at Lisa Cooley was described as a move "beyond the jokey use of tropes culled from computer-graphics programs" and a turn to drawing by Stephen Maine in the summer 2015 issue of ARTnews.

While critical of her overall show at Lyles & King in 2018, New York Times Art Critic Martha Schwendener, described an in situ installation made of spray paint and canvas as indicative of her best work. "Ragged and kind of punk, it reminds you of what made Ms. Benson’s art exciting in the first place when, armed with analog paint and digital thinking, she took on the history of painting and won a round."

1. Shapes of Things, Lisa Cooley, New York, NY
2. Paint, Horton Gallery, New York, NY
3. Paradox Maintenance Technicians, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA
4. Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation New Acquisitions, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ
5. Idealizing the Imaginary: Illusion and Invention in Contemporary Painting, Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI
6. Cuts, Paints, Trudy Benson, 2018, Team (Bungalow), Venice, CA
7. Trudy Benson, Closer Than They Appear, 2018, Lyles & King, New York, NY