Amina Benbouchta works across painting and embroidery, creating images that transform everyday objects into something charged and mysterious.
Her paintings are made with acrylic on gold and copper leaf. The metallic surfaces reference centuries-old traditions such as Byzantine icons and illuminated manuscripts, yet Benbouchta's approach is distinctly contemporary.
Flowers, fruit, furniture and clothing appear against these glowing grounds, rendered with loose, expressive brushwork. A lantern drifts beside a cloud. A wine-red dress pools across the canvas. Red ballet shoes sit caged within a sketched outline. These familiar things feel at once intimate and strange, as if glimpsed in a half-remembered dream.
Benbouchta often returns to certain motifs: the pomegranate, a symbol of fertility and hidden knowledge; the empty chair, suggesting both absence and anticipation; flowers in states of exuberant bloom. Her palette moves between deep carmines, soft pinks and vivid greens, always in dialogue with the reflective surface beneath. The gold and copper catch the light differently depending on where you stand, giving each work a subtle, shifting quality.
The embroideries offer a striking contrast. Using black thread on white linen, Benbouchta traces minimal, delicate forms: a sleeping dog, an empty swing, a glass, a cage. These spare compositions strip away color and gesture, leaving only line. The effect is quieter, more contemplative, closer to drawing than painting. Where the canvases overflow with movement and texture, the embroideries hold back, inviting slow looking.
Across both bodies of work, Benbouchta explores the boundary between presence and absence, the seen and the felt. Domestic spaces and objects become sites of memory and longing.
Amina Benbouchta
Solo exhibition | The Quiet Language of Life
Dates | April 12 - 26, 2026
Private Viewing | April 16 - 6-8 pm (artist present)
Courtesy M-R-S ART (London) | Ronewa Art Projects (Berlin)
16 Victoria Grove, London W8 5RW
