Ben McLaughlin (London, 1969) completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Central St. Martin's School of Art in 1993, followed by a Masters in Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art. In 1992, he won first prize at the Falkiners Fine Paper Young Artists Award, the Cohn & Wolfe Young Artist Competition in London, and the Cecil Collins Memorial Award for Drawing, also in London. In 1994 and 1996, Ben received first prize for the Médaille d'Honneur de la Ville de Salies-de-Béarn in France. In 2005, he was awarded a prestigious artist residency at the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, United States. Ben's work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States.

His paintings are imbued with nostalgia, intimacy, and emotion, shaped by a wide range of influences and complex iconography drawn from film, photography, and literature.His compositions appear fragmented through cropping and the choice of surprising viewpoints. His enchanting, poetic work is indebted to artists such as Hopper, Whistler, and Winslow Homer. The paintings embody the perfection of imperfection; atypically composed panels, sometimes an expression of an incomplete memory. Images that are often typical of a specific generation or a moment in time. The titles of the works themselves are often borrowed from newspapers, radio, crossword puzzles, and other surprising sources. Unexpected and sometimes comical, these references give the panels a mysterious twist. Something Ben himself likes to call a sense of 'disconnect'.