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Daniel H Bell (b.1980) lives and works in the UK, with a practice that revolves around painting and filmmaking. His work explores the fragile relationship between humans and their natural environment, with enigmatic set pieces, involving various animal and hybrid characters.
Awarded the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2024, Bell's ambiguous-looking paintings display an ever-changing cast of peculiar creatures, rotting surfaces and miscellaneous body parts. Working intuitively and embracing accidents, his pieces are a chaotic mixture of realism, caricature and abstraction. The imagery that he creates usually veers toward the recognisable forms of human faces, native wildlife and anything that his subconscious drags up in between. Cartoon-like imagery often collapses into something more obscure, shifting from the humorous to the sinister and horrific.
Bell's video work evolves symbiotically with his paintings, producing a visceral coming together of different organisms and various contraptions. His films take shape through the construction of small models and sets, using stop-motion, time-lapse and other techniques to create uncanny scenes of life and death. Either humanely incorporating real animals, or spilling over into the territory of painting, the emphasis of the videos is on the tactile and the dreamlike. They show encounters with nature that are as distorting and destructive as they are affectionate.
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Education
2007 Norwich School of Art and Design MA Digital Practices – Distinction
2003 Glasgow School of Art BA (Hons) Fine Art – First Class
2000-2001 Rhode Island School of Design
1998-1999 Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology
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Selected Exhibitions
2024 Contemporary British Painting Prize – BayArt, Cardiff
– Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London (1st Nov - 17th Nov)
– Yorkshire Artspace, Sheffield (30th Nov - 11 Jan)
2024 AIR Open 2024 – Rogue Artists' Studios, Manchester
2024 The Horror! – Project 78 Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea
2023 Society of Scottish Artists Annual Exhibition – The Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr
2023 Bridge – Tjörnedala Konsthall, Skåne, Sweden
2022 Contemporary British Painting Prize – Huddersfield Art Gallery
– Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London
2022 The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity – The Island Venue, Bristol
2022 Living With the Past – Cupola Contemporary Art, Sheffield
2022 Derwent Art Prize 2022 – Gallery@Oxo, London
2022 Janus Revisited – Cupola Contemporary Art, Sheffield
2013 Vestlandsutstillingen – Tour of various venues in Western Norway
2012 The Stuff of Nightmares – V&A Museum of Childhood, London
2011 Sturiale Paper Projects 1 – Sturiale Project Space, Gorizia, Italy
2010 Drawings from the Collection by Brindle and Bell – V&A Museum of Childhood, London
2009 Salthouse 09 – The Church of St Nicholas, Salthouse, Norfolk
2008 Harmlos: Endlich Menschlich – Montana, Berlin, Germany
2008 Kettle’s Yard Open – Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
2008 Salon 08 – Matt Roberts Arts / VINEspace, London
2007 The Sprezzatura Maze – Studio Warehouse Gallery, Glasgow
2006 Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition – London
2006 Concrete Allotment – Temporary Contemporary, London
2005 East International 2005 – Norwich Gallery, Norwich
2004 Sample Glasgow – Galleri Wetterling, Stockholm, Sweden
2003 Daniel Bell, Piotr Janas – Transmission Gallery, Glasgow
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Selected Film Screenings
2020 Another Hole in the Head Film Festival – San Francisco, USA
2017 Antimatter Media Art – Victoria, Canada
2009 London Short Film Festival – ICA, London
2009 Leftfield and Luscious – Tenderpixel Gallery, London
2009 Flatpack Festival – The Electric Cinema, Birmingham
2008 Filmfest Dresden: International Short Film Festival - Germany
2008 700IS Experimental Film and Video Festival – Egilsstaðir, Iceland
2008 London Short Film Festival – ICA, London
2008 Cannes in a Van – Cannes Film Festival, France
2008 Screen Tests I – ABEL Neue Kunst, Berlin
2007 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen - Germany
2007 Lange Nacht der Kultur – Kaiserslautern, Germany
2007 Capalbio Cinema International Short Film Festival – Toscani, Italy
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