Trudy Benson | 9 Artists Who Made Major Gallery Moves This Summer

The right partnership between an artist and a gallery is one that fosters growth and helps to move an artist’s career forward. For many artists, joining a new gallery can often open up different possibilities when it comes to their practice. It also often introduces their work to a wider net of curators and collectors. The relationship between gallery and artist has become all the more crucial as the world slowly begins to open back up after a year and a half of disruption brought on by the ongoing pandemic. Below, we highlight nine artists who made major gallery moves this past summer.

Trudy Benson

B. 1985, Richmond, Virginia. Lives and works in Brooklyn. 

Trudy Benson, known for her exuberant, abstract paintings that are reminiscent of 1980s computer graphics, joined Miles McEnery Gallery in mid-May. The gallery’s representation announcement caps the meteoric rise of the New York–based artist, whose colorful grids and patterns have been exhibited in solo and group shows for over a decade and are in the holdings of London’s Saatchi Gallery, as well as mega-collector couple Susan and Michael Hort. Benson’s first solo exhibition with Miles McEnery Gallery is scheduled for this winter in New York.

The painter’s layered works of geometric shapes, stripes, and flattened forms have shown up on the secondary market a total of 23 times. Her top auction record currently stands at $32,500, set in 2014, when the large-scale work Red Giant (2011) sold for nearly double its high estimate at a Phillips sale in New York. While her secondary-market demand has since wavered, on Artsy, interest in Benson’s spunky and joyous paintings spiked last year, with the number of inquiries on works by the artist nearly doubling from the year prior.