Ella BenAmi is a London-based artist whose work finds expression through painting, video, poetry, and sound. For over two decades, her painting practice embodied a deep investigation of what she calls Mental Landscapes, using the language of abstraction, which enabled multiple layers of exploration and discussion across metaphysics, the psyche, animism, and the environment. Her large-scale canvases stretch across themes of non-physical awareness, totems, forest networks, and interconnectedness.
Amidst the global pandemic, BenAmi underwent a personal and artistic transformation, during which she deepened her connection with the Earth and the natural world, channelling its profound metaphysical essence. BenAmi is now developing an examination of trees as energetic entities, and as creations of art with abstract tendencies that manifest through lines, shapes, compositions, and colours. According to BenAmi “Trees undertake cycles of abstracted processes of growth and expansion that are at once spontaneous and deliberate, arbitrary and accurate. Their boundless capacity for coexistence, unification, communication, and cooperation across species without a sense of hierarchy offers a possibility for a more evolved model for humanity”.
BenAmi’s abstract paintings blend opaque and transparent layers and textures, incorporating elements from nature; sometimes as painted hints and sometimes through botanical photographic prints integrated into the artwork. This fusion expresses the artist’s view of the inherent interconnectedness and reciprocity between humanity and the natural world. BenAmi’s observation of nature is intimate, acknowledging that her existence depends on it. The term Mental Landscapes renews its significance, now conveying a more complex notion of natural landscapes in resonance with mental landscapes, reaffirming the existence of our psyche and humanity as an integral part of nature.
BenAmi started her artistic journey as a musician in Israel, performing with music groups from a very young age. She studied Asian Philosophy and Medicine between 1995 and 2000. She travelled extensively across India and the US where she studied Painting at the Corcoran College for Art and Design in Washington D.C. from 2003 to 2007. In 2016, she obtained an M.A. in Documentary Film Practice from Brunel University in London, where she resides and works. Ella participated in numerous exhibitions in the U.S, including in Bill Lowe Gallery (Atlanta), Seth Jason Beitler Gallery (Miami), Willow Street Gallery (Washington DC), 1ShanthiRoad Art Centre (Bangalore India), Ramat-Gan Museum of Contemporary Art (Israel), and more. Her works are in many private collections worldwide.
My works gather around the desire to organise and create a certain kind of distinctiveness that would allude to systems of codes or symbols that seem to exist within structures of reality that are alternate to those we apprehend in our everyday lives.
During the past 2 and a half decades, I have delved deeply in my work into a field I call the "landscapes of changing mind". My view is that mental landscapes or landscapes of consciousness must be located in a space, just as physical or three-dimensional landscapes are. This location is the basis for their existence and development. Our inability to distinguish and perceive this alternate space with our senses does not negate the validity of those mental realities that wish to realize value and meaning, independently of physical existence.
I enter a painting as though I had already somehow been transported into the non material realm and examine a certain landscape from the inside.
Each time anew, I begin to render the particular landscape from the language and material that it's environment both demands and provides me.
Through these emerging landscapes, I investigate the boundaries of materiality versus non-materiality, the boundaries of perception and consciousness and the boundaries of my ability to communicate by means of various media with the world of observation.
The reality of the dream, which we treat as something that has no concrete presance, is in my view the point of access to those very alternate environments that interest me, so this is a further topic that I wish to explore.
What if everything that happens in our dreams truly exists, but at a different level or location that cannot be apprehended by the same criteria as is physical reality?
Even while I explore the reality of the dream, my focus is on the level of sensation and intuition and less on its narrative aspects.
That overused term 'the psyche' contains a great structural paradox because, despite the innumerable theories of the soul and the various thought trends that have arisen within modern psychology and philosophy, this phenomenon still remains largely obscure and resistant to precise logical and scientific analysis.
©All Rights are reserved to Ella BenAmi. 2025
Ella BenAmi is a London-based artist whose work finds expression through painting, video, poetry, and sound. For over two decades, her painting practice embodied a deep investigation of what she calls Mental Landscapes, using the language of abstraction, which enabled multiple layers of exploration and discussion across metaphysics, the psyche, animism, and the environment. Her large-scale canvases stretch across themes of non-physical awareness, totems, forest networks, and interconnectedness.
Amidst the global pandemic, BenAmi underwent a personal and artistic transformation, during which she deepened her connection with the Earth and the natural world, channelling its profound metaphysical essence. BenAmi is now developing an examination of trees as energetic entities, and as creations of art with abstract tendencies that manifest through lines, shapes, compositions, and colours. According to BenAmi “Trees undertake cycles of abstracted processes of growth and expansion that are at once spontaneous and deliberate, arbitrary and accurate. Their boundless capacity for coexistence, unification, communication, and cooperation across species without a sense of hierarchy offers a possibility for a more evolved model for humanity”.
BenAmi’s abstract paintings blend opaque and transparent layers and textures, incorporating elements from nature; sometimes as painted hints and sometimes through botanical photographic prints integrated into the artwork. This fusion expresses the artist’s view of the inherent interconnectedness and reciprocity between humanity and the natural world. BenAmi’s observation of nature is intimate, acknowledging that her existence depends on it. The term Mental Landscapes renews its significance, now conveying a more complex notion of natural landscapes in resonance with mental landscapes, reaffirming the existence of our psyche and humanity as an integral part of nature.
BenAmi started her artistic journey as a musician in Israel, performing with music groups from a very young age. She studied Asian Philosophy and Medicine between 1995 and 2000. She travelled extensively across India and the US where she studied Painting at the Corcoran College for Art and Design in Washington D.C. from 2003 to 2007. In 2016, she obtained an M.A. in Documentary Film Practice from Brunel University in London, where she resides and works. Ella participated in numerous exhibitions in the U.S, including in Bill Lowe Gallery (Atlanta), Seth Jason Beitler Gallery (Miami), Willow Street Gallery (Washington DC), 1ShanthiRoad Art Centre (Bangalore India), Ramat-Gan Museum of Contemporary Art (Israel), and more. Her works are in many private collections worldwide.
My works gather around the desire to organise and create a certain kind of distinctiveness that would allude to systems of codes or symbols that seem to exist within structures of reality that are alternate to those we apprehend in our everyday lives.
During the past 2 and a half decades, I have delved deeply in my work into a field I call the "landscapes of changing mind". My view is that mental landscapes or landscapes of consciousness must be located in a space, just as physical or three-dimensional landscapes are. This location is the basis for their existence and development. Our inability to distinguish and perceive this alternate space with our senses does not negate the validity of those mental realities that wish to realize value and meaning, independently of physical existence.
I enter a painting as though I had already somehow been transported into the non material realm and examine a certain landscape from the inside.
Each time anew, I begin to render the particular landscape from the language and material that it's environment both demands and provides me.
Through these emerging landscapes, I investigate the boundaries of materiality versus non-materiality, the boundaries of perception and consciousness and the boundaries of my ability to communicate by means of various media with the world of observation.
The reality of the dream, which we treat as something that has no concrete presance, is in my view the point of access to those very alternate environments that interest me, so this is a further topic that I wish to explore.
What if everything that happens in our dreams truly exists, but at a different level or location that cannot be apprehended by the same criteria as is physical reality?
Even while I explore the reality of the dream, my focus is on the level of sensation and intuition and less on its narrative aspects.
That overused term 'the psyche' contains a great structural paradox because, despite the innumerable theories of the soul and the various thought trends that have arisen within modern psychology and philosophy, this phenomenon still remains largely obscure and resistant to precise logical and scientific analysis.
©All Rights are reserved to Ella BenAmi. 2025