Felix Benton: What Grows Sideways
September 4-22, 2026
Nine, 112 Madison St, New York, NY 10002
Press Release
Reception
September 11, 6-8 PM
Open Hours: Fridays-Sundays, 1-5 PM & by appointment
Felix Benton’s practice is invested in slow looking — a color placed slightly too far to the left, an uneven shape, an accidental mark, and the entire structure shifts. In his Brooklyn studio, he works across several paintings at once, flipping, rehanging, scrubbing, and reworking each surface until it settles. Benton plants x and cultivates y. In Wind Flower (2026), flatness lets the composition slide back and forth between foreground and background, refusing to settle into either. An underlying tension in land line (2026) pulls one into the underpainting as it surfaces through the gaps, then pushes back out toward the final image — the eye caught between what’s buried and what’s finished. cackling (2026), both flat and dense, cracks where forms come together. Negative space flips back and forth across the plane through drips, records, and marks.
Entering the room with this body of unruly and honest works, one makes their own way — navigating through each frame, and through the entire landscape of the gallery.
What Grows Sideways points to this refusal of linear resolution — growth and image-making that accumulate rather than optimize. Benton's goal is for a painting to grow more complicated, not less, the longer it's looked at. They succeed almost against their own logic, reflecting the process of their own making. Paintings that seem built to spread outward instead reach upward. In the garden of x and y, the real harvest may turn out to be z.
Images courtesy of Site Service, photographed by Farfar studio
Service is a proud partner of the New York-based curatorial partnership Nine.
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