A person with curly hair and flushed cheeks lounges on gold fabric beneath a large ornate clock, holding a painting of a white classical statue. The sky behind them is dramatic and stormy, with dark clouds and silhouetted tree branches.

Lulu Bennett

Lulu Bennett is a Lancashire-born painter whose work explores history and gender, currently through paintings of her alter-ego Samantha Pepys. Bennett’s paintings are a time-travelling collision of 17th-century glam and contemporary transfeminist resistance; a transhistorical vision of Britain that sits between a National Trust heritage aesthetic and a haunted, postcolonial state.

Bennett has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions in London, Berlin and West Palm Beach. In 2023 Bennett was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize and the East London Art Prize. She won the Chadwell Award in 2021 and the Royal Scottish Academy’s Stevenston Award in 2018.

In 2025 the artist was selected as an awardee of the third edition of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award.

1. Samantha Pepys/Lulu Bennett, Aphrodite and the Absurd Passage of Time, 2023-24. Image courtesy of the artist.
2. Lulu Bennett, Samantha Pepys & The Biological Lie, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Deniz Guzel