Ben Wakeling

Bio

Ben Wakeling (b. 1990, UK) is a Hackney-based painter whose work explores the unstable boundary between figuration and abstraction. Shaped in part by his involvement with arts initiatives connected to NHS mental health services, his practice reflects a close engagement with vulnerability, care, and the fragile structures that hold human experience together.

His paintings are developed through an intuitive, process-led approach in which images emerge gradually through layering, revision, and erasure. Rather than working from a fixed composition, Wakeling treats the canvas as a site of ongoing negotiation, allowing forms to surface, shift, and dissolve over time.

Figures appear only partially within his work, often fragmented or obscured, hovering at the edge of recognition. These moments of near-legibility create a tension between presence and disappearance, drawing attention to the act of looking itself. Through hesitant marks, reworked surfaces, and shifting spatial relationships, Wakeling builds compositions that remain open and provisional rather than resolved.

This sensitivity to instability and attention carries into the work not as narrative, but as atmosphere. Painting becomes a space for reflection, focus, and exchange, where meaning develops gradually through the accumulation of decisions made across the surface.

Wakeling’s paintings resist immediate clarity, inviting a slower, more attentive engagement. In this way, painting operates as a process of searching rather than resolution, holding form only temporarily as it emerges and recedes within the surface.