Dorothy Circus Gallery London is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Ben Ashton, one of the most compelling and distinctive painters working in Britain today. Ashton is a master of subversion, an artist who fuses evolving technology with self-taught classical techniques to produce work that is at once visually seductive and intellectually demanding, beautiful and fundamentally challenging.
His paintings engage directly with the traditions of portraiture, drawing particular inspiration from the swagger portraits of Thomas Lawrence and the grandiloquent self-presentation that characterised official painting at moments of political confidence. Ashton takes that vocabulary and turns it against itself, deploying the aesthetics of authority to interrogate the hypocrisy and nostalgia that run through contemporary political discourse. His canvases catch power in the act of performing itself, and they do so with a painter's eye and a satirist's intelligence.
Ashton's understanding of portraiture is also deeply personal. Reflecting on his broader practice, he describes it as a visual chronicle of his own life and the lives of those around him. A posthumous retrospective of his work would, he suggests, reveal an entire journey: you would see someone grow old. This investment in time, in the human face as a record of passage, connects him to the long and strange lineage of portraiture itself. "It has been a part of humanity's means of expression for centuries," he has said of the form, and it is precisely that resilience, that refusal to become obsolete, that animates his practice. He finds in it something genuinely alive: a form that absorbs the present and survives it.
The works in this exhibition continue Ashton's exploration of history's cyclical nature, the way the past is never simply past, but is perpetually being weaponised, romanticised and reinvented in the service of the present.
