BEN REEVES PARKLIFE
Saturday, November 14th - Saturday, December 12th
In Parklife, Ben Reeves explores the intersections of painting, landscape, and public space. Reeves considers parks as places where nature and culture meet, and where our ideas about the natural world are constructed, negotiated, and continually reimagined. “While working on Parklife I have been thinking a lot about painting and parks. But my attention is not divided. When I am painting pictures of parks it is the best of both worlds. I am spending time in parks and painting simultaneously. And not idly. I am feeling out the identity and meaning of both spaces. It turns out that parks have a lot to say about painting and vice-versa.” - Ben Reeves Like parks, paintings offer spaces for sustained attention and reflection. Both are shaped by long histories of how we understand and represent nature, bringing the landscape into the city and the outdoors into our interior lives. In Parklife, Reeves explores these parallels through a varied painterly language, moving between pointillist marks, scraped and layered surfaces, and moments of observational realism. The paintings shift between the tangible and the fleeting, revealing landscape as something at once material, constructed, and continually in flux. Human activity animates these scenes: people picnic, sunbathe, read, play games, and gather beneath illuminated trees. Recreational spaces become sites where cultural histories and social conventions are embedded in the landscape, from the geometry of sports fields to the rituals of leisure and play. Reeves invites us to consider parks and landscape paintings as more than places of respite or representation. Both are shaped by competing ideas about nature, ownership, access, and belonging. At a moment when questions of land, ecology, and public space are increasingly urgent, these spaces offer a way to examine our relationship with the environments we inhabit— and the cultural and political values that shape them.
Ben Reeves Picnic, 2026 oil and acrylic on canvas 52 x 68 in.
Ben Reeves Night Tennis, 2026 oil, acrylic and sand on canvas 52 x 68 in.
Ben Reeves Park Wedding, 2026 oil, acrylic and watercolour on canvas 60 x 48 in.
Ben Reeves Flaming Motorcycle, 2026 oil and acrylic on canvas 24 x 18 in.
Ben Reeves Flaming Motorcycle, 2026 oil and acrylic on canvas 24 x 18 in.
Ben Reeves Stringing Lights, 2026 oil and acrylic on canvas 68 x 52 in.
“In the big cities they’ve set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don’t have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick.” - Andy Warhol
Ben Reeves Fountain (Small), 2026 oil on canvas 16 x 20 in.
Ben Reeves Red Sea, 2026 oil and acrylic on canvas 16 x 20 in.
Ben Reeves Park Chess Players, 2026 oil and acrylic on canvas 68 x 52 in.
Ben Reeves June, 2026 oil and acrylic on canvas 52 x 68 in.
Ben Reeves Pale Sun, 2026 oil and acrylic on canvas 16 x 20 in.