Ben Sledsens

Ben Sledsens was born in 1991 in Antwerp, Belgium, where he continues to live and work. He trained in painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, graduating in 2015, and that year received the KoMASK Award for painting, presented by Belgium's Royal Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts.

He had his first solo exhibition with Tim Van Laere Gallery in Antwerp in 2016, beginning a relationship that remains his primary gallery representation a decade later, with shows at the gallery's Antwerp and Rome spaces including Two Trees (2018), Under the Tree Distant Sea (2020), Un Nuovo Viaggio (2023 to 2024), To Live Is To Fly (2025), and Lust for Life (2026). In 2017 he had his first solo exhibition in the United States, before the crow crows, at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles. He has also shown at the Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga in Spain in 2023, and in 2026 presented a solo corner of new work, including a sculpture, at Perrotin.

Sledsens paints colorful, narrative scenes, often set in forests, lakes, or other pastoral settings populated by figures and animals, that draw openly on the history of painting. His work has entered the collections of the M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Sledsens has not yet been the subject of extensive signed criticism in major art publications, and no verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. In curatorial language used by the M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp to describe its collection, his paintings are said to build a dreamlike, self-contained reality out of a continuous dialogue with art history. His institutional recognition to date consists mainly of collection acquisitions rather than major prizes, alongside the KoMASK Award for painting he received in 2015, the year he graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.

Sledsens's auction market is young and has moved quickly. His record is Throwing Dice, which sold for GBP 504,000 (about USD 636,786) at Christie's London on 29 June 2023, a world auction record for the artist. Other high results point to broad demand rather than a single outlier: A second nice break made USD 279,400 and Bear in the Deep Woods made USD 201,600, both at Phillips, though exact sale dates for these two results could not be confirmed. Because his secondary market is still forming, individual results should be read against a short track record rather than a long price history.

Sledsens's market is defined by rapid early price appreciation, gallery-controlled scarcity through Tim Van Laere Gallery, and a still-short auction history concentrated between 2023 and 2026. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authenticity for any work should be confirmed with Tim Van Laere Gallery, his primary representative. A recent solo presentation with Perrotin bears watching, since it is not yet clear whether it reflects expanded gallery representation or a one-time collaboration. Collectors should treat individual auction results, in a market with so few repeat sales, as data points about demand for a specific work rather than as evidence of a settled long-term price trend.