Building a Painting: A Conversation with Kim Benson

Banner Image: Detail of Folio Swell, 2026 / Oil, enamel, metallic leaf on fabric and canvas, 72 x 67 x 1 1⁄4 inches. Courtesy of TOA Presents.

◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ 

The first time I saw Kim Benson's work was at the Minnesota Museum of American Art. As a semi-regular volunteer, I sat in the galleries, monitored the artwork, and helped answer guests' questions. One painting always drew my gaze, particularly for its intricate detail. It hung on the wall opposite the George Morrison Gallery. After that encounter at the M, I started noticing Kim's work everywhere. In May 2025, I saw Radix (2025) at The Auction at MCAD. A few months later, I saw Wall Flower on view at the Walker Art Center, hanging squarely opposite a Philip Guston. (Kim has a knack for hanging across from my personal heroes, Philip Guston and George Morrison.)

When I got word that Kim Benson was having a solo show at TOA Presents in Minneapolis, I could not help but reach out and ask for an interview, especially since her work had captured so much of my attention. What follows is our conversation, edited for length and clarity. We talk about her work, her process, and the upcoming Kim Benson: New Paintings, on view at TOA Presents. Enjoy. 

 

---

 

Laura Laptsevitch: How did this show at TOA Presents come together?

Kim Benson: I've worked for multiple years with Rob Sherer the director and founder of The Orange Advisory and TOA Presents. I had a show with Hair and Nails around 2016, a three-person show called Relief, with Rachel Collier and Sheila Wagner. Each of us had our own solo component. I met Rob during that show, not necessarily at the opening, but during its run. We didn't start working together right away, but he was interested in my work, and then we collaborated with Hair and Nails on a show I had at TOA in 2022.

Over the past several years I've had multiple projects with Rob. He doesn't represent artists, exactly, but he works with artists for certain durations. I really love working with him and hope to continue. This recent project started at least 18 months ago. The work takes me a while to make, and that's mostly what drives the timeline.

 

LL: For anyone unfamiliar with your work, how do you build a painting?

KB: I'm a process-based painter. I have a lot of ideas, interests and visuals in my head, from things I'm looking at and reading, but I don't know where the work will end up. I have strategies and techniques in my toolbox, and I'm interested in using them in many different ways, through a lot of repetition and a lot of undoing and redoing, numerous times. It can seem completely bonkers: why even do that? But then I get somewhere I didn't know I would go.

I'm a painter, but not so much in terms of brushwork or depicting illusionistic scenes. I think about how to build a painting rather than paint a painting. My work tends to be very physical and dense. I can obsess about illusionistic space or fetishize the surface, and I do all of that, but the work tends to live on the surface. It's tactile and material-rich.

 

Image: Eclipsing (Palette Driver), 2026 / Oil, enamel, metallic leaf on fabric and canvas, 63 x 56 x 1 1⁄4 inches. Courtesy of TOA Presents.

 

LL: The circles, triangles, and squares feel very deliberate in your work. What draws you to them?

KB: The elemental forms, such as triangles and circles, came about during a series I made for the 2022 show at TOA, and a little before and after. I'd been looking at El Greco's work for a really long time, and at the Baroque and the Renaissance. El Greco's paintings in particular interested me: his depictions of Mary Magdalene, portraits of saints, and biblical scenes. I noticed the halos around the angels' heads.

I was looking for a way out of being so expressive, a more technical, formal, concrete approach. The triangle and the circle are perfect, or supposed to be. They aren't amorphic or nebulous. I wanted to put those structures into the paintings, partly to challenge my technical ability with masking, and to work these elemental shapes within a kind of corrupted ground.

The grounds of my paintings become difficult to work back into and this challenge interests me in ways of understanding the limits and possibilities of painting. Oil paint doesn't dry fast, and you're trying to tape a careful, exact line on this muddy surface. I thought: oh, I could challenge myself.

I also liked the idea of connecting to the halos, and thinking of them as circles as portals. I think a lot about cosmology, the universe, time, and the mysteries of being alive and what's possible. I'm not a religious person, but I'm spiritual in some ways. I grew up Catholic, and I'm riddled with questions about the possibilities of what's beyond, and about energy. These forms just started to come in. The masking techniques I use also present shapes to me, which gave me insight into ways of shifting things within the paintings.

 

Top image: Folio Swell, 2026 / Oil, enamel, metallic leaf on fabric and canvas, 72 x 67 x 1 1⁄4 inches. Courtesy of TOA Presents. Bottom Image: Detail of Folio Swell, 2026.

 

LL: Your imagery often zooms in on one specific thing. How does that relate to the circle and the halo? Take the Case Edgerton piece, for example.

KB: I love images as much as I love abstraction. I also love collage and its aesthetic within a painting. I think the language of collage is very attuned to the 21st century, to our fast-paced, multifaceted world. The work I created for the ArtBoard at Case Edgerton Studios was a collage mixed media painting. The image is of a portrait of Maria van Oosterwijck, a 17th century Dutch Golden Age artist painted by Wallerant Vaillant in 1671. I believe that this portrait is a homage to her and her dedication to painting and Christianity. 

I'd been painting from her still-life paintings for a while, and then I shifted to portraits. In this portrait I focused on her hands, the book and the palette, getting at how time works within the studio. There's something meta about making work that is very tactile and seems to contain all of this time. I love hands and books, and they work as metaphors for the things I'm interested in: care, craft, touch, inquiry, knowledge, and the historical and contemporary narratives that inform culture today. 

 

Left image: Portrait of Maria van Oosterwijck, 1671, by Wallerant Vaillant. Collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Right image: Installation view of Re-adding (after Maria van Oosterwijck), 2026, a collage painting enlarged as a print for Case Edgerton Studios' board at the corner of Case and Edgerton, St. Paul.

 

I made the painted collage, which was mediated through a digital scanner and became a JPEG, then was printed on a giant board. Scott Sebert and Jessie Fisher, put that large print on the board. When it shifted in scale, it shifted in media, and it became something it wasn't before. That same image, the hands, is in the painting you saw at Case Edgerton Studios.

 

LL: Does the new work include similar elements, like the hands, books, and geometric shapes? What can we expect, and what's continuing from this series?

KB: The show I'm debuting has all of those elements in it. I've done many things that feel very much the same, but the work has also changed in a lot of ways, as happens when you keep doing and seeing what happens.

I made three diptychs, which I hadn't done before: two larger paintings put together. I had a strategy, or at least a problem I wanted to investigate, which was how to bring a lot of variety into a single work, making it seem as though things were coming from different spaces, different times, different centuries. My hands are in the work, and the imagery, but there are also other elements, and a lot of it is diffused. El Greco's Mary Magdalene in Penitence is part of it too, but everything is very abstracted.

 

Image: Interlude’s Flight, 2026 / Oil, enamel, metallic leaf on fabric and canvas, 62 x 88 x 1 3⁄4 inches. Courtesy of TOA Presents.

I tend to work on many tracks and meander around. I work imagistically, and then I'll go clear into abstraction, with qualities that maybe can still be recognized or named.

 

LL: That ties into my next question: how do you know when a work is done?

KB: A deadline is very helpful. I'm grateful for this opportunity at TOA Presents, and I'm so excited and happy about it. I always think, "It could be this. It could be different. What if I did that?" Resolution is difficult for me; it's ongoing.

I love painting, not necessarily a painting. Well, I love a painting, but it's more the verb. Paintings are often really, really challenging because they're huge problems to solve, especially toward the end, when it gets very technical and you don't have a lot of options. I think de Kooning said there aren't many options when you finish a painting. There's really one option, because you've built yourself into a corner. You either do a small, minor thing, or you get rid of the whole thing and start over.

For this work at TOA, some of the paintings were completely different. They were probably finished paintings, and I scraped them back, sanded them back, and said goodbye, many times. Subtraction is almost as exciting and wonderful as addition, because I didn't end up getting rid of all of it. It becomes this compressed, mysterious thing that I can work back into.

 

LL: What are you hoping people take away from the show? If someone is seeing your work for the first time, what would you like them to experience?

KB: I'd like them to delight in the experience of seeing the work, and to think about it in whatever way they want, to have an experience they remember, at least for a little while. Ideally the work makes people pause and take time with the painting. The paintings are dense, and not just in their tactility. They unfold slowly. They're meant to be experienced, not just seen as images. They resist being simplified. I hope people take time, enjoy looking and thinking, and maybe are inspired to go out and do something creative. Or to think more about the potential visual art can have in one's life. That's a lot to ask, and I don't really think that way. But when you see something that moves you, you don't necessarily think, "That visual thing is going to do this to me." I think it has a ripple effect. It makes people more curious to go see or make more art, or just gives them a joyful experience.

 

Image: Kim Benson, of Power and Sensibility, 2026, oil, enamel, metallic leaf on fabric and canvas, 63” x 56” x 1 ¼”

 

---

 

I think back to that painting at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the one I kept returning to while I was supposed to be watching the room. All that intricate detail is the evidence of many layers, tape lines pulled and repositioned, sanding back and starting over. Kim's work holds a lot of time, and it asks the viewer to spend some time of their own. Go, and give the work longer than a glance. You may leave wanting to look at, or make, something more.◼︎ 

Kim Benson: New Paintings is on view at TOA Presents starting on October 22. The opening reception takes place Thursday, October 22 is from 6:00 to 9:00pm  at TOA Present's new location in Northeast Minneapolis, 1808 Quincy Street NE.