Daniel H Bell, Soft Touch, 2023, Acrylic, varnish and gel on MDF, (8x13 cm) 10x15 cm framed

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.