Ben Sledsens valuation
Antwerp painter of bright, flattened idylls of forests, animals and figures, in a line from Bruegel through Rousseau to Matisse.
Ben Sledsens was born in Antwerp in 1991 and still lives and works there.
What a work by Ben Sledsens is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Ben Sledsens was born in Antwerp in 1991 and still lives and works there. He studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, graduating in 2015, the year he received the KoMASK Award for painting, and had his first solo exhibition at Tim Van Laere Gallery in Antwerp the following year; the gallery has represented him since. His paintings turn everyday life, characters from literature, animals and borrowings from the history of art into a private utopia: figures in landscapes and forests, animals, interiors and still lifes, set down in strong flat colour with a deliberately naive perspective and a high degree of finish. Critics have placed him in a tradition that runs from Pieter Bruegel the Elder through Henri Rousseau to Matisse, and the Flemish landscape painting he grew up among is never far away.
His output is small, so most of what comes to market is a painting on canvas, from the large figurative compositions to smaller still lifes and animal pictures; works on paper appear less often. Provenance through Tim Van Laere and the date of the painting are what a buyer checks first, and the flat, saturated fields of colour show scuffs and retouching clearly.
Antwerp, the Academy and Tim Van Laere
Tim Van Laere Gallery followed his first solo exhibition of 2016 with further shows in 2018 and 2020, and Nino Mier Gallery gave him his first in the United States, before the crow crows, in Los Angeles in 2017.
He paints slowly, and a single large canvas can take him as long as a month, which keeps the number of finished paintings low.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
