Saatchi Yates presents 'Kind Hearted Sinners', Benjamin Spiers’ first-ever solo exhibition in Paris, showcasing a new body of work from the English artist who continues his practice of creating otherworldly portraits inspired by cubism and surrealist modes of figuration. Spiers’s enigmatic figures, often suspended in a fictitious abyss, explore the fragility of beauty found within the grotesque and the horrorful, baring the delicate thread between youth and frailty.
Amalgamating contemporary portraiture with ancient historical references, Spiers offers a meditation on the transience of life and the preservation of the body, both physically and spiritually. In 'The yellow shirt', 2024, the face of the adolescent King Tutankhamun is affixed to the form of a morphing body. Haunted by the awareness of death, this fusion of the past and present reflects a newfound interest in the afterlife, prompting his viewers to explore the impermanence of existence.

“Spiers isn’t just an artist, he’s an engineer driven by a gut instinct to play around and subvert expectations - his own as much as anyone else’s” - Christina Donoghue

Spiers’ exploration of decay and the inevitable passage of time further unfolds through a series of small- er-scale portraits. In 'Blush', 2024, a figure gazes directly at the viewer, their youthful vitality evidenced from their bright, flushed cheeks and flowing blonde hair. Drawing on references that span from the ancient world to the present, Spiers’s figures become immortalized through the act of painting, youthful or not. Through this narrative, Spiers invites viewers into a realm that teeters on the edge of the fantastical and the familiar, where the fleeting beauty of youth is both celebrated and mourned.