'Vida'; screenprint, signed, dated '78, titled and inscribed 35/100 in pencil.

Anthony Benjamin "An idea is more important to man than any physical object" ICA exhibition catalogue, 1966.

Anthony Benjamin was an artist who worked in many media: painting, sculpture in wood, metal and plastics, drawing and printmaking and the above sentence sums up the continually evolving spirit, influences and expression that is apparent in his work throughout his career.

Born in Boarhunt, Hampshire, he studied art at the Regent Street Polytechnic, an education that was complemented by three months' studying drawing in Pariswith Fernand Leger.  When he graduated in 1954 having received the Silver Medal for Painting, he was working in a social realist style and exhibited at the Beaux Arts gallery, the London home of the kitchen-sink artists.

In the mid 1950s he settled in Cornwall, joined the Newlyn Society of Artists, and produced abstracted works of the Cornish landscape and sea, also influenced by the American abstract expressionists whose work was being seen in Britain for the first time.  In 1957, he won a scholarship to study printmaking at Stanley William Hayter's legendary print studio, Atelier 17 in Paris and in 1960, he was awarded an Italian government fellowship.  In the 1960s, he returned to London where his work reflected a concern with form and signs and he began to demonstrate a well-developed sense of colour and a preference for intense hues.  Between 1967 – 1973 he moved to North America and held several positions as a professor of fine art, returning to Britain in 1973 to establish himself as a prolific and gifted printmaker producing his work through his Hope (Sufferance) Press.  Throughout his career he had numerous important shows including those in the 1960s in the ICA and at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.  His work is held internationally, including examples in the Tate Britain, the British Council, the Government Art Collection, and MoMA New York.