Ben Newman: Masks

In the spirit of design experimentation Ben Newman has taken his illustrations off of the page and into the third dimension with new Nobrow show Masks. Featuring 11 brand spanking printed works that merge shamanistic headgear and mid-century design to striking effect, Ben has also made three of his designs into intricately layered wooden objects in an enviable display of father/son collaboration (I once set up a huge Scalextric track with my dad but that was never shown in a gallery). We popped down to Nobrow’s Great Eastern Street space on opening night to see how things were coming along.

To see Ben’s work in the flesh is to be stunned. His creations are so precise and laboured you’d naturally assume them to be computer-generated, but being a champion of traditional processes they are in fact all hand drawn. Regularly working with industrial lithography has also given him a flair for colour that is rarely seen amongst contemporary illustrators – building up images using a limited palette of over-layed process colours gives Ben’s work a muted subtlety that is best seen in the flesh.

In short, check it out.

www.bennewman.co.uk