TRUDY BENSON
TRUDY BENSON
TRUDY BENSON’S KALEIDOSCOPIC WORLDS
Natalie Haddad
When I was in graduate school, I used to pass the campus supercomputer center on my walk from the parking structure to the gym. I probably could have gone inside and seen the interior, but I preferred to imagine it: As soon as you walked through the door, I would think, you’d cross over into another world, one that seemed flat and dimensional at once, where floating pixels crystallized into impossible architecture, colors glowed like jewels, and cyberspace was an untamed frontier.
The first time I saw Trudy Benson’s art, I felt as if I was entering that supercomputer world. Have You Seen Me? (2021), from her first exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery, titled “Waves,” is a dizzying collision of shapes and colors. An undulating checkerboard dominated by blue and pink takes the eye on what feels like a roller coaster ride: Motion is suspended at the base of each curve before we are whisked into another vertiginous drop. Blocks sporting another checkerboard pattern, this one in drippy coats of cream and yellow, float atop, along with two crooked X’s, which heighten the sense of disorientation. Skeins of oil paint squeezed directly from the tube (the thickest in pulsating red) add texture, so that materiality and illusion compete for attention.
Are we observing different dimensions coexisting in the pictorial space or a single reality with its own perplexing laws of physics? I’ve continued to experience this sensory effect as I’ve seen more of Benson’s kaleidoscopic paintings—and her visual world, where phenomenal reality meets hyperreality, remains as wondrous as my imaginary supercomputer realm. In fact, computer graphics have played a role in shaping her aesthetic. As the artist explained in a 2021 interview, she created her first abstract compositions with MacPaint on her family’s old Macintosh SE when she was a kid. Radiant light, pixelated forms, and the spatial dissonance that comes from mapping 3D objects onto a
1 Nicole Bray, “Artist to Watch: Trudy Benson,” Interview by Mercer Contemporary, posted on the Miles McEnery website, October 7, 2021. https://www.milesmcenery.com/news/trudy-benson-interview-by-mercer-contemporary.
2D background are all characteristic of pioneering programs like MacPaint and Windows Paintbrush, and of digital imagery more generally. These qualities inform Benson’s aesthetic, but to think of her art as an analog interpretation of the digital sells it short. The more I look at her paintings, the more I wonder if she has actually distilled a specific way of seeing at the interface of analog and digital?
Benson and I are both “Xennials” (born between 1977 and 1985), a “micro-generation” that encompasses the youngest members of Generation X and the oldest millennials. Though I fall on the Gen X side and she falls on the millennial, we both came of age at a moment of social and technological transition; we’re old enough to remember when people connected through landline phones rather than email, text, and social media, but we had the internet at our fingertips by the time we were in high school or college.
The overlapping of virtual and real-life worlds at a formative age arguably fostered a kind of “bilingualism” — a comfort with both worlds that allows for fluid movement between them, which extends to visual perception. Benson’s art draws attention simultaneously to the materiality of the medium and the opticality of the surface. She builds her images layer by layer in a process that gestures toward the discrete layers that compose digital art. But the results are resolutely physical, even as she achieves a trompe l’oeil effect that brings hands-on mark making uncannily close to virtual imagery. Starting with a colored ground, she covers the canvas with masking tape and draws shapes with an X-Acto knife. Those are filled in with brushy acrylic hues, betraying the physicality of the medium. She repeats the process, painting the next set of shapes with thick oils. It’s these forms, their cut edges revealing the tiniest of layers, that conjure the illusion of collage. Benson plays with perception and tactility again in her final step of squeezing oils from the tube directly onto the canvas; these shiny, quivering lines are often the points of greatest chromatic and haptic intensity in her works.
In Ping (2023), from her 2024 exhibition “XSTATIC,” the grid format—that symbol of modernism as well as screen-based technology—serves as the composition’s foundation, though Benson skews it
2 “The Psychology of Xennials,” Psychology Simplified, February 11, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqs0PokPDqo.
Jack Whitten, Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant, 2014, Acrylic on canvas, 124 1/2 x 248 1/2 inches (316.2 x 631.2 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Acquired through the generosity of Sid R. Bass, Lonti Ebers, Agnes Gund, Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, Jerry Speyer and Katherine Farley, and Daniel and Brett Sundheim.
Elizabeth Murray, Children Meeting, 1978, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 101 3/16 x 127 inches (257 x 322.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art/New York, NY, Purchase with funds from the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc., Seymour M. Klein, President.
5 enough to emphasize the human hand and imagination—angling, stretching, and compressing its cells. Within each cell is a pattern of vibrating concentric marks that evoke a vortex, albeit one that might be doodled in a sketchbook. Translucent squares in blue and white, filled in with airbrushed loops, come next, seemingly hovering atop and merging with the grid. Finally, she disrupts the rhythm of the whole with a labyrinthine trail of turquoise paint.
While the rectangular canvas echoes the shape of a computer or TV screen, and the title alludes to digital messaging, Benson invokes a host of art historical references, among them the grid, of course, as well as the hypnotic patterning of op art, the luminous mosaics of Jack Whitten, the balletic rhizomes of Albert Oehlen, and the playful irreverence of Elizabeth Murray (whom Benson has cited as a major inspiration).
The broad accessibility of digital technologies in the 1980s and ’90s was accompanied by an expansion of pop culture beyond fine art that was coextensive with and influenced by the aesthetic of technology. As fluent as Benson is in art history, I’ve caught glimpses of these sundry artifacts in her visual language. The geometric building blocks of her paintings can recall classic video games like Tetris and Pac-Man. Her airbrushed shapes and squiggles evoke graffiti tags. Her fragmented planes, saturated colors, and ebullient lines bring to mind a range of cultural references, from early MTV
graphics to the hand-drawn animation of shows like The Simpsons and Ren & Stimpy to Gary Panter’s artwork and set designs for Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
The latter, in particular, shares DNA with Benson’s painted spaces in the way that visual and design elements seem to redefine an actual place with an alternate spatial logic. Similarly, Benson’s purely abstract compositions can suggest places—buildings, rooms, landscapes—that exist according to their own logic. And in both cases, what we see is transmitted through a flat plane, whether it’s a TV screen or a canvas.
All of these pop cultural products have roots in analog art—underground comix, postwar design, pop art, and historical abstract painting—coming full circle, in a sense, from analog art to digital influences and then back to the handmade basics of modern art. In another full-circle moment, Benson’s most recent paintings look back to the looseness of some of her earlier works, which adds to their playful quality. Irregular squares and rectangles imply grids without announcing them and share space with slivers of color and thick threads of oil paint, all rendered in a limited but exuberant palette.
In Tell It Slant (2025), the diagonal thrust of the forms that crowd the canvas—some tall and skinny, others big and broad—rush toward something beyond the pictorial space. Here, Benson seems to channel the dynamic shapes that populate works by Elizabeth Murray and Mary Heilmann, to name two important predecessors, without relinquishing her own formal idiosyncrasies. Shades of yellow and pale green cohere the image. Pink, red, gray, and black jump into the mix, and jagged lines activate the composition as they accentuate the dialectic between surface and depth, simultaneity and temporality.
No Green Stars (2025) is anchored by a symmetrical motif that sets it apart from the other works. At the center of the canvas are four chartreuse-yellow rectangles surrounding a darker, divided rectangle, like a box with its top flaps open to show the contents inside. The symmetry risks overly stabilizing the
3 Rachel Davies, “Let’s Talk About Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” Architectural Digest, May 23, 2025. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/lets-talk-about-pee-wees-playhouse.
composition, but in this painting the symmetry serves the action, giving way to a whirlwind of shards emerging from and circling the central motif. Smaller versions of the motif orbit it, accompanied by irregular grid cells filled in by airbrush with dense, wavering green lines. Slate-blue confetti floats on the surface, while raised blue, purple, and orange stripes whip across the picture plane in every which way.
The vertical, human-scale Blue Stack (2026) employs similar means for an architectural effect. Rectangles—both outlined and filled in—are stacked precipitously, like presents about to topple onto the floor. At the same time, the aggregate parts convey a loose structure, thanks in part to a large white rectangle in the bottom right quadrant. Within the whole, this expanse of space makes an ideal door, while the outlined shapes could be windows. A fiery red square in the painting’s upper half complicates but doesn’t discourage this reading. Rather, it poses the question of whether the onlooker is outside looking in or vice-versa. Either way, the field of white seems like a threshold, out of place amid the painting’s topsy-turvy, red-purple world and ours, but bridging the two.
When I look at Benson’s paintings today, I still envision another world, just as I did initially, but my perception has changed slightly—as perception tends to when enough time is spent with her exhilarating imagery. Instead of seeing a fantastical cyberspace, I imagine a place of different, better possibilities, one that may not be accessible now but will eventually come into focus. That’s what great abstraction can do: In leaving our reality of things and definitions behind, it presents the chance to see so much more.
Natalie Haddad is an art critic and historian whose writing examines modern and contemporary art through questions of gender, embodiment, and the relation between visual form and lived experience.
Spot the Difference,
2024
60
152 x 137 cm
Acrylic and oil on canvas
x 54 inches
58
147 x 163 cm
No Green Stars, 2025
Acrylic and oil on canvas
x 64 inches
Note
2 Self, 2025
43 x 47 inches
109 x 119 cm
Acrylic and oil on canvas
48 x 48 inches
122 x 122 cm
Pucker, 2025
Acrylic and oil on canvas
Tell It Slant, 2025
61
66 inches
155 x 168 cm
Acrylic and oil on canvas
x
The Nerves, 2025
72 x 96 inches
183 x 244 cm
Acrylic and oil on canvas
Ultra Violet, 2025
Acrylic and oil on canvas
48 x 54 inches
122 x 137 cm
244
Blue Stack, 2026
Acrylic and oil on canvas
96 x 54 inches
x 137 cm
Immaterial, 2026
Acrylic and oil on canvas
80 x 72 inches
203 x 183 cm
244
Monkey Green, 2026
Acrylic and oil on canvas
96 x 54 inches
x 137 cm
Never Odd or Even, 2026
61
66 inches
155 x 168 cm
Acrylic and oil on canvas
x
Was it a Cat I Saw?, 2026
54 x 56 inches
137 x 142 cm
Acrylic and oil on canvas
60
152 x 137 cm
Zing & Pep, 2026
Acrylic and oil on canvas
x 54 inches
Trudy Benson
Born in 1985 in Richmond, VA
Lives and works in Newburgh, NY
EDUCATION
2010
MFA, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
2007
BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2026
“IM/MATERIAL,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
2024
“XSTATIC,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Nothing Net,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Lyon, France
2023
“Plastic Paintings,” Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria
Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT
2021
“WAVES,” SUNNY NY, New York, NY
“Hard Color Heat Wave,” Massif Central, Brussels, Belgium
“WAVES,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“/ Z / Z /,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Saint-Étienne, France
2018
“Cuts, Paints,” Team (Bungalow), Los Angeles, CA
“Closer Than They Appear,” Lyles & King, New York, NY
“Infinite Spiral,” Dio Horia, Mykonos, Greece
2017
Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland
“Garden in Motion,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Paris, France
2016
“Cosmicomics,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg
City, Luxembourg
“Spooky Action at a Distance,” Half Gallery, New York, NY
2015
“Shapes of Things,” Lisa Cooley, New York, NY
2013
“PAINT,” Horton Gallery, New York, NY
2011
“Actual/Virtual,” Mike Weiss Gallery, New York, NY
2010
“Space Jam,” Freight + Volume, New York, NY
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026
“Alley Cats,” Ruttkowski;68, New York, NY
“Kent Blossom Art Intensives Resident Faculty and Visiting Artist Exhibition,” School of Art, Kent State University, Kent, OH
“Charged Field,” G-Town Arts, Georgetown, CT
“Couples,” Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY
2025
“That’s All Folks,” TW Fine Art, Palm Beach, FL
“Massif Central x McLennon Pen,” McLennon Pen Co. Gallery, Austin, TX
Kayrock Editions, New Paltz, NY
“Line Load,” Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY
“Soft Chaos,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Koerich, Luxembourg
“Small Paintings Show: XXS” (curated by Wendy White), Brintz + County Gallery, Palm Beach, FL
2024
“All Bangers, All The Time: 25th Anniversary Exhibition,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Holiday,” Harper’s, New York, NY
“The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020,” Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL
“Dis/Order” (with Russell Tyler), Louis Buhl Gallery, Detroit, MI
“Artists in Residence 2023,” Krinzinger Schottenfeld, Vienna, Austria
2023
“(Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract,”
Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY
“CURATED BY: NAZIF LOPULISSA,” m.simons, Amsterdam, Netherlands
“I AM THE PASSENGER,” Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY
2022
“Why I Make Art” (curated by Brian Alfred), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Sunrise/Sunset,” SUNNY NY, New York, NY
“zzzzzzzzzzzzz” (with Russell Tyler), Mother Gallery, Beacon, NY
“4EVA” (with Russell Tyler), Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany
2021
“Light” (curated by Rico Gatson), Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY
“Phase 1,” The Hole, East Hampton, NY
“Path of the Storm,” SUNNY NY, New York, NY
RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland
2020
“Join,” LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
“Accrochage,” RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland
“True Lines,” Over the Influence, Los Angeles, CA
“100!,” LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
2019
“Decoy” (curated by Marc Mitchell), Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR
“New Edition: Print from the Past, Present, and Future at Pratt” (curated by Grayson Cox and Caitlin Riordan), Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
“Rise,” RIBORDY THETAZ, Geneva, Switzerland
“le ciel, l’eau, les dauphins, la vierge, les flics, le sang des nobles, l’ONU, l’Europe, les casques bleus, Facebook, Twitter,” Forde, Geneva, Switzerland
2018
“MOONDOG,” East Hampton Shed, East Hampton, NY
“10 Years in Luxembourg,” Ceysson & Bénétière, Windhof, Luxembourg
“Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY
Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2017
“Come as You Are,” Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montréal, Canada
“Post Analog Painting II,” The Hole, New York, NY
“Pro-Forma: Context and Meaning in Abstraction” (curated by Vittorio Colaizzi), Work Release Gallery, Norfolk, VA
“Unobstructed Views,” Hawkins Ferry House, Grosse Pointe Shores, MI
“TT52” (with Yann Gerstberger), Lyles & King, New York, NY
2016
“Bodacioussss,” Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO
“Re-Planetizer” (curated by The Pit), Regina Rex, New York, NY
“Splotch,” Sperone Westwater, New York, NY
“The City & The City,” Denny Gallery, New York, NY
“Non Figuration - un regain d’Intérêt?,” Centre d’art contemporain, Meymac, France
“9999,” The Fireplace Project, East Hampton, NY
“Image Tech: Making Pictures in a Post-Digital Age” (curated by Mauro Zamora), The College of New Jersey Art Gallery, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ
2015
“PaintersNYC,” Páramo, Guadalajara, Mexico; traveled to Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, Oaxaca, Mexico
“Feed the Meter,” Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Windhof, Luxembourg
“Let’s Go Away for Awhile” (curated by Erik den Breejen and Maria Calandra), One Mile Gallery, Kingston, NY
“Swingers WKND” (curated by Tribble and Mancenido), New York, NY
“Anti-Fair,” Harper’s Books popup, Carlyle Hotel, New York, NY
“Post-Analog Painting,” The Hole, New York, NY
“Trudy Benson and Russell Tyler,” Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, NY
“Trudy and Russell,” East Hampton Shed, East Hampton, NY
2014
“Go With the Flow,” The Hole, New York, NY
“Sunscreen,” James Graham & Sons, New York, NY
“Abstract American Today,” Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom
“OK Great Thanks This Is So Ridiculous,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA; traveled to DCKT Contemporary, New York, NY
“This One’s Optimistic: Pincushion,” New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT
“Material Images,” Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, NY
“The Last Brucennial,” Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York, NY
2013
“Merge Visible,” Horton Gallery, New York, NY
“SPLAZITCH,” Side Effects Gallery, New York, NY
“Paint On, Paint Off,” Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY
“Windows,” Denny Gallery, New York, NY
“XSTRACTION,” The Hole, New York, NY
“Paradox Maintenance Technicians,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA
2012
“Aggro Crag,” BOSI Contemporary, New York, NY
“Where My Cones At?” (curated by Ryan Travis Christian), Double Break, San Diego, CA
“Pratt Alumni Painters,” Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, NY
“Spindles” (curated by Adam G. Mignanelli), Kinfolk Studios, New York, NY
“WET WET” (curated by the BLAAAHg), Brooklyn, NY
“Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation New Acquisitions and Prints,” Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ
“Idealizing the Imaginary: Illusion and Invention in Contemporary Painting,” Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI
2010
“Behind the Green Door,” DNA Gallery, Provincetown, MA
“Pratt MFA Exhibition,” Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, NY
2009
“Fervor,” Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, NY
“Down Below It’s Chaos,” ArtJail, New York, NY
“A Piece,” LABA Artists’ Space at the 14th Street, New York, NY
2008
“Refinement,” Aswoon Gallery, New York, NY
“Studio 23 Presents LOL the CommandP BFF 4EVA
Portfolio,” Transmission Gallery, Richmond, VA
“Transmission Introduces Studio 23,” Transmission Gallery, Richmond, VA
2007
“24/7 Fire in the Hole,” Plant Zero Art Center, Richmond, VA
AWARDS + RESIDENCIES
2026
Visiting Artist, Kent Blossom Art Intensives, School of Art, Kent State University, Kent, OH
2023
Artist in Residence, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, Austria
2014
Nominee, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, New York, NY
2012
Painting Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY
SELECT COLLECTIONS
Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon
Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, New York, NY
Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY
New York State Museum, Albany, NY
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME
Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA
Susan and Michael Hort Collection, New York, NY
Published on the occasion of
TRUDY BENSON IM/MATERIAL
25 June – 14 August 2026
Miles McEnery Gallery 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011
tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com
Publication © 2026 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved
Essay © 2026 Natalie Haddad
Photo Credits
p. 7: © 2026 Jack Whitten Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY / Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York, NY
p. 7: © 2026 The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY / Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, New York, NY
Associate Director Julia Schlank, New York, NY
Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY
Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY
ISBN: 979-8-3507-6543-4
Cover: The Nerves, (detail), 2025
