Victoria Benson ( Vika Benson)

Biography and art education

Victoria (Vika) Benson (born 1964) is a London-based multidisciplinary visual artist.

Her diverse practice spans sculpture in clay, ceramics, works on paper, and painting, all of which have a striking intensity.

Born in Abkhazia, Georgia (then part of the USSR), in 1964, she spent twenty-two years in Israel working as a senior medical doctor before moving to England in 2014 to pursue art full-time.

This background informs her attention to the body, vulnerability, and repair.

She studied art for more than ten years at Morley College, The Essential School of Painting, and Turps Banana Art School, alongside private mentoring with artist mentor Ceri Hand.

Benson exhibited at The Essential School of Painting in 2022 and 2024, in multiple exhibitions at Boomer Gallery, and at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2025, where her painted ceramic vessel “Doctor” was selected and sold.

Her primary subject is the strong, almost classical “earth mother” figure, sculpted and painted in many guises in an uncompromising half-Cubist, half-Surrealist style that she has made her own.

Working intuitively with clay, paint, charcoal, and plaster, she builds psychologically charged figures that balance humour, tenderness, and unease.

Artist Statement

My practice begins with the human figure. I build bodies as vessels—forms that can hold memory, care, vulnerability, and transformation. Medicine, migration, and the experience of making a life in different countries are part of the work’s emotional ground. Sculpture and ceramics give me a direct, physical language. I hand-build in clay and work with painted and glazed surfaces, allowing each figure to retain marks of touch and process. Alongside sculpture, I continue to work in painting, drawing, and collage. I am interested in the point where strength and fragility meet. The figures are not portraits; they are carriers of inner states, inviting viewers to bring their own histories and emotions to them.