Benjamin Jones

Art Brokerage: Benjamin Jones American Artist: b. 1954. Benjamin Jones creates haunting images that reveal a distinct visual language. Subjects include current events and icons of popular culture; however, his most consistent subject is himself. Inhabiting an intriguingly indefinable space, each of these poignant self-portraits reveals the artist's innermost feelings and insecurities. Mixing whimsy with horror, humor with malevolence, Jones' forms become vehicles for messages about the struggle of life and all its paradoxes. These seductive and intimate drawings, paradoxical in themselves, create a tension between the purity of their intuition and the refinement of their presentation. Stylistic parallels have been drawn between Benjamin Jones' work and that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as with Jones' acknowledged influence, Jean Dubuffet and the works of Art Brut. However, his drawings are undeniably his own. Larry Rinder, former Curator of Contemporary Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, comments that Jones' drawings possess "...energy, vitality, those...impalpable feelings - the sense that the work had to be there, that it was compelled by some internal urgency on the part of the artist." Benjamin Jones' drawings are included in prominent museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia PA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA, as well as significant corporate and private collections. Jones received a 1994 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Southern Arts Federation. In 2004 he was the recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. In 2006, Jones made his international debut at ArtLondon. He returned to London in 2008 as the featured artist in Drawing a Diversion; an exhibition at John Martin Gallery, in conjunction with Master Drawings London. Jones is a graduate of the State University of West Georgia. Listings wanted