Ben Rider's screenprints are punk printmaking with the volume turned all the way up
Fluoro inks, scuffed edges, anti-corporate energy — and most of it sits well under £100.
Most "edgy" art is just beige with a tattoo. Ben Rider's screenprints are the opposite — fluoro-loaded, scuffed at the edges, built from layers that look like they've been arguing with each other. He's described his own practice as "a middle finger to the increasingly homogenised slick corporate world", and once you've seen the work that quote stops feeling like marketing and starts feeling like a job description.
He's also one of the most consistently good printmakers stocked at Atom Gallery, with most of his work landing well under £100. So if you've been circling the idea of buying a print and waiting for something with actual teeth, this is your sign.
WHO IS BEN RIDER?
Rider is a London-based illustrator and printmaker, and a member of the US-based Fatherless Print Collective. He's been called a "fluoro-ink obsessed screenprint lunatic", which is the kind of nickname you don't get for making polite work. His prints are built up from drawings, collaged imagery and multi-layered colour, and he leans into offsets, drips and fades to get that authentically distressed look — the texture you can't fake by sliding a filter over a vector file.
His commercial work has stretched into the kind of brands that go looking for someone with a pulse: Crocs, Brewdog, Film4, Samsung, and 5 Seconds of Summer. The interesting bit is that none of that has dragged the work into corporate territory. The prints still feel like they were pulled in a back room with the radio too loud.
Why the work actually hits
There's a lot of "punk-inspired" art floating around that's basically a Sex Pistols mood board with the spikes filed down. Rider's stuff is different because the punk part isn't aesthetic dress-up — it's in how the prints are made. Misregistrations stay in. Drips stay in. The fluorescent pinks and oranges are doing actual work, not just sitting there for vibes. There's a Wabi-Sabi streak to it, where imperfection is the whole point, and that's a much harder thing to fake than slapping a halftone on a stock photo.
The other reason it works on a wall: the prints have weight. They're not "wallpaper that won't argue with your sofa" art. They're closer to a small loud guest in the room. If you've got a hallway, a kitchen, a flat that's a bit too magnolia, this is the kind of work that fixes it.
Where to start if you're new to Rider
If you've never bought a print before, three of his pieces at Atom are a good way in. "Bear Thrills" is the lowest entry point — small, punchy, easy to live with. "Be Lucky!" is the four-colour fluorescent screenprint that most people clock first when they walk in: a 50 x 70cm signed edition of 50, properly bright, properly built. And if you want something that nobody else on your group chat is going to have, the screenprinted, decommissioned spray cans are exactly the kind of object that keeps getting picked up at parties.
A nudge: prints from Rider tend to be limited editions, so once a colourway is gone, it's gone. Worth checking the live page before falling in love with a specific run.
