ABOUT
Ben Ponté is a New York based visual artist, experience creator and host of Drawn from Within.
Ben Ponté is an Australian-born, New York-based visual artist whose work explores perception, identity, and the relationship between inner experience and the world around us. His paintings and drawings combine a painterly sensibility and rhythmical mark-making with curious poetic associations and bad jokes.
Across self-portraits, subway encounters and inverted cityscapes, his work explores the uneasy relationship between bodily experience and the increasingly mediated world around us. Digital devices recur as objects that alter our gestures, absorb our attention and complicate the boundaries between public and private experience. The self-portrait and the creative act become a fulcrum between self and world, inside and outside, observer and observed, body and soul.
Ben’s artistic practice has developed alongside a longstanding engagement with yoga and philosophy. The work of J. Krishnamurti and the archetypal psychology of James Hillman have been significant influences, particularly Hillman’s understanding that images have an intelligence and autonomy of their own. Hillman’s invitation to let the image speak remains a touchstone, particularly when what emerges unsettles or contradicts our considered and respectable intentions.
Alongside his studio practice, Ben hosts participatory drawing experiences. Beginning with sketching encounters on Manhattan’s streets in 2017, this work developed into Drawn from Within, bringing drawing together with storytelling, poetry, conversation and reflection. These encounters extend his interest in how we see, what we overlook, and what happens when we attend fully and wholeheartedly to the creative act.
Ben holds an MFA from the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts, and has exhibited in Australia and the United States. His work is held in the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts Collection and in private collections internationally.