Series

Women in Triumph

A deeply personal body of work honouring the women whose care, sacrifice, and resilience shaped Benjamin Asante's life through absence, loss, and survival.

2019

An early figurative cycle of tribute, grief, and feminine endurance

Series statement

Women in Triumph is a deeply personal early series shaped by the women who sustained Benjamin Asante through absence, loss, and instability. Growing up without a father, later losing his mother, and then being raised by his aunt, he came to understand womanhood not as an idealised symbol, but as a lived structure of endurance, sacrifice, and protection.

After the death of his aunt's husband, that understanding became sharper. These paintings attend to women carrying grief, responsibility, tenderness, and survival at once. They are not generic portraits, but meditations on care and the unseen labour through which home, memory, and emotional life are held together.

Within the series, women appear as nurturers, mourners, protectors, survivors, and sources of renewal. Women in Triumph stands as both tribute and testimony: an early figurative body of work honouring the strength that made Benjamin Asante's own life possible.

Themes

Care
Resilience
Grief
Renewal
Feminine endurance

Process

Single figures composed with frontal clarity so presence remains more forceful than anecdote
Colour used symbolically to carry tenderness, grief, transition, and emotional strength
Portraits shaped as acts of tribute rather than types, allowing stillness to register as dignity
Emotional interpretation drawn from lived family memory instead of detached observation

Works in the series