Next oneATELIER
Amel Bennys
September 10th, 2025

oneATELIER is delighted to visit artist Amel Bennys’ studio in Créteil, on the outskirts of Paris, easily accessible by RER D line, on September 10th, 2025. 

Amel Bennys is best known for her large-scale mixed-media paintings and wood/metal sculptures, inspired by her own memories and experiences. Whatever materials or processes she employs—whether painting, sculpture, installation, or writing—the central force behind her practice is the encounter and its inevitable counterpart, loss. Bennys works through layers of emotional responses to negotiate her relationship with a well-defined social environment, and the position she occupies within it.

For Bennys, colour functions both as a structure and as an object within space. Working between painting and sculpture, she explores layered textures and pigments, developing a distinctive visual language that runs throughout her extensive body of work. By building successive layers of natural pigments, a process that transforms the material itself, colour takes on its own form and becomes an object in its own right.

She paints with natural pigments, composing a wide range of tones to find the exact shade required in each moment. Alongside colour, she works with masses—their movement, correlation, disappearance, and trace.

The instant of creation guides the artist: her works come into being at a precise moment and in a specific place. It is the works that go to the artist, not the other way around, and the canvas becomes the site of this encounter. Everything unfolds in the slowness of the creative gesture, where nothing is gratuitous and only what must appear, appears.

As Nabil Naoum has observed: “Amel Bennys’ works are very close to the art of the icon, through the sanctification that takes place of the hidden form, condensed into a luminous halo in which lines and volumes float…”

This studio visit offers a rare chance to witness how Bennys’ works come into being—through a practice shaped by time, memory, and the ongoing dialogue between her art and personal space.

Born in Tunisia in 1970, spending her childhhod between Paris and Tunisia, Amel Bennys obtained her MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Early in her career, she was awarded Les Étoiles de la Peinture, leading to exhibitions at Maeght Galleries in Montrouge (1991) and Barcelona (1996). In 1999, she participated in Hors les Murs at Villa Medici, Rome, and in 2006 she took part in Les Environnementales, the biennial of contemporary sculpture in Jouy-en-Josas, France.

In 2012, Bennys was invited by the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut. The following year, she relocated to New York, first living in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and later in East Harlem. In 2018, she presented a solo exhibition at Galerie Silas Von Morisse, which continues to represent her. In February 2019, she exhibited at the Lehman College Museum, and later that year she received the Jackson Pollock – Lee Krasner Foundation Award.

Her trajectory continued internationally: in 2021, she was nominated by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, receiving the Final List Prize with an introduction by Sheila Hicks. In 2022, her work was shown at Lilia Ben Salah Gallery, Paris, and in 2023 she presented 32 bis – Tunis: Le Cheveu de Mu'awiya, which was widely covered by Le Monde Diplomatique, HuffPost, Daily Art Fair, and ARTE/FR3.

Her works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art (Ohio), David Zwirner Gallery (London), Agnès B, Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Pascal Quignard, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Intervest Development Corp, and the Tunisian Ministry of Culture.

In March 2019, Bennys was arbitrarily banned from the United States by the Trump administration, a rupture that resulted in the loss of her New York studio and community. This displacement profoundly marked her, as if lived reality had merged with the very obsessions that drive her artistic practice.