Nicola Bennett: The Colour of Flavour
Works
Overview
Nicola Bennett, The Colour of Flavour

My love of cooking and painting often intertwine. While a meal may vanish within moments of its creation, a painting endures — holding the same passion and joy, yet lasting long after the moment has passed.

Nicola Bennett

In this new body of work, Nicola Bennett turns her attention to four key ingredients — foraged asparagus, mushrooms, aubergine, and roasted grapes — exploring their sensory qualities through colour, gesture, and form. Created over many months, the paintings trace the transformation of these ingredients from the earth to the imagination, translating flavour and colour into a rich visual language. Nicola continues to push into new territory, seeking that point of tension between familiarity and surprise — work that excites both artist and viewer. 

 

Her layered, often large-scale canvases pulse with energy: translucent veils of colour are punctuated by playful mark-making, evoking the pleasure and immediacy of flavour itself. Each painting invites the viewer to look closely and sense deeply, to experience painting as a kind of tasting.

 

This is Nicola’s second solo exhibition with ARTIS, reaffirming her distinctive position in contemporary abstraction — one grounded in the sensory world, yet always reaching toward something freshly felt and newly seen.