Secondary Market
Ben Eine
British, born 1970
Ben Eine (Benjamin Flynn, born London 1970) is a British street artist and typographer whose letters, painted across East London shop shutters, turned single words into public art. A co-founder of Pictures on Walls with Banksy, he saw one of his paintings presented by the UK Prime Minister to President Obama.
Biography
Ben Eine, born Benjamin Flynn in London in 1970, is a painter of letters. Since the early 2000s his single capitals, painted on the steel shutters of shops along Hackney Road and Brick Lane, have made East London read like an oversized type case — work that sits somewhere between graffiti, sign painting and type design.
From shutters to words
In 2003 Eine set up the print house Pictures on Walls with Banksy, and the two showed together that year in Banksy vs Eine at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. In 2010 he painted the whole alphabet along Middlesex Street, soon nicknamed “Alphabet Street” by its neighbours. On canvas his practice settled on single words — LOVE, HATE and many others — set in his own circus-inspired letterforms, an idea he explored in Love/Hate, his 2011 solo show at Megumi Ogita Gallery in Tokyo. He has since released typefaces of his own, including New Circus (2019).
A state gift and a museum survey
In July 2010 Prime Minister David Cameron presented Eine’s painting Twenty First Century City to President Barack Obama as an official gift from the United Kingdom. The next year he was included in Art in the Streets at MOCA Los Angeles, the first major survey of graffiti and street art in an American museum, and designed the poster for Amnesty International’s 50th anniversary. In 2020 he designed a capsule for the London Eye’s twentieth anniversary.
Selected exhibitions
- 2007 — Vandalism, Kemistry Gallery, London
- 2008 — Urban Art, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen (group)
- 2009 — The A–Z of Change, Carmichael Gallery, Los Angeles
- 2014 — HEARTFELT, Judith Charles Gallery, New York
- 2015 — Your Not My Type, StolenSpace Gallery, London
- 2018 — Everything Starts Somewhere, StolenSpace Gallery, London