Myles Bennett American, b. 1983

Myles Bennett (b. 1983 Nashville, TN) is a Brooklyn-based artist working in painting, drawing, and sculpture. A graduate in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design (‘06), his focus on the personal scale of construction and materiality has evolved into an exploration of the intersection between gesture and the inherent properties of surface. 

Myles Bennett is interested in the junction of architectural drawings, 18th century landscape paintings, and the organized space of woven and raw canvas. For centuries, canvas has been stretched, primed, and conditioned for the creation of a multitude of genres of paintings, has been left bare, has been painted all white and all black, has been gridded with graphite, and has represented what we understand to be a picture plane. It is not that Bennett’s work subverts this, but enters into the conversation of what is a picture plane. His explorative process has led to figurative paintings, sculpture, photography, minimalist and maximalist drawings, and various forms of abstraction that combine these diverse mediums, all delving into what lies within and underneath this historic material. 

Whether the process lends itself to drawing lines guided by the canvas grain, inking into the cotton fibers, or the precise extraction of the canvas’s warp, leaving the weft behind, all tactics seek to fuse the artist’s curiosities and the surface’s condition into an aesthetic balancing act.

Bennett has exhibited widely across the United States and Europe, with solo and group shows at Pamela Walsh Gallery (Palo Alto, CA), JDJ (New York, NY), Rutger Brandt Gallery (Amsterdam and Rotterdam, NE), Dimmitt Contemporary (Houston, TX), Espositivo Gallery (Madrid), and Wassaic Art Project (Wassaic, NY). His work has also been featured in major art fairs including the Armory, NADA Miami, Dallas Art, NADA Foreland, Art Rotterdam, and Art Market San Francisco. Bennett’s pieces have entered private and public collections, including acquisition by the Stanley Morgan Chase, TIAA, and the Bridgestone/Firestone Trust Fund Painting Collection at the Tennessee State Museum.

He continues to live and work in Brooklyn, New York, expanding his dialogue between material, structure, and perception through the enduring yet ever-evolving language of canvas.