Next oneATELIER
Amel Bennys
September 11th, 2025

oneATELIER is delighted to visit artist Amel Bennys’ studio in Créteil, just outside Paris, on Thursday, September 11th, 2025. The studio is easily accessible by the RER D line.

Amel Bennys’ introspective, layered practice draws on her sensorial memory and complex lived experience. Moving fluidly between painting, sculpture, installation, and writing, she creates energy nodes where memory, emotion, body, and process converge. Her works evolve through slow accretions of material and thought that produce painterly geologies—emotional terrains that remain in flux, continually reflecting and renegotiating her relationship with both the real and the mnemonic spaces she inhabits.

Colour is central to Bennys’ language. Working with an array of paints and natural pigments, she builds dense fields of tone and texture that transform surface into palpable masses in space. These accumulations of colour move beyond representation, taking on a structure of their own—sites where existence, absence, and trace are held in fragile balance. In this way, Bennys pushes painting toward the metaphysical, where colour is experienced not as medium but as a force that brings form into being.

For Bennys, creation is inseparable from time and place. She approaches each work as a dialogue rather than an imposition, allowing it to unfold with gestures that are deliberate, patient, and unforced. Her process is as much about listening as it is about making, attuned to the subtle insistence of forms and tones that demand visibility. Nothing is gratuitous: what persists is allowed to take form, while what recedes leaves behind its resonance. Each work thus carries the imprint of its becoming, embodying both the moment and duration of its emergence.

As writer Nabil Naoum has noted, “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 practice.