DUELLE X BENK&BO | SPRING SHOW

Feb - July 2022
A curation of emerging artists by Duelle Studio and Benk&Bo.

Featured Artists:
Karimah Hassan, Luna Mara, Liam Palmer, Jacob Monk, Daniel Fletcher, Jessica Bird, Tejumola Butler Adenuga, Louisa Loakes and Cansu Ceren Ilkan.
See full artist bios below.

THE ARTISTS

Karimah Hassan
London
Figurative Contemporary Painting

Born in Wales with Yemeni and Bangladeshi heritage, Karimah has an expressive, bold aesthetic and is heralded for ‘taking stories of community gatekeepers full circle, from the canvas to the streets‘. Karimah creates live paintings at performance events across London and New York in order to highlight the importance of communities in the city. 

Karimah graduated MA Architecture from the Royal College of Art, London, 2016, and from the Mural Career Development programme, Toronto, 2019. Clients include The Barbican, Ted Baker, Arts Council England, The Highline New York, Toronto Arts Council, and Crxss Platfxrms.

The pivotal aspect of Hassan’s practice involves hosting ‘community showcase teasers’ under the disguise of an exhibition. In a curated line up, Karimah exhibits her paintings alongside poetry readings, open-mic sessions, live jazz and even football matches. In this way, Hassan combines the artwork, the painting subject, and community members together in one space. 

Karimah creates her work from the studio, to the street, to the canvas; it moves between these spaces, questioning the delineation between street art, fine art and community art. The journey of each piece and the audience it connects to is as fascinating as the art itself.

Luna Mara
Netherlands
Textile wall hangings

Luna Mara (b. 1994, the Netherlands) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the balance between art and craftsmanship. She is mostly self-taught, and manoeuvres intuitively between different disciplines. After obtaining her bachelor degree in Multimedia Design (2017) she followed a semester in Denmark where she focused on learning the craftsmanship of ceramics. As a natural counterpart to her practice, Luna started working with textiles as well; a medium that became familiar to her at a young age as she watched her grandmother make large embroidered tapestries while growing up. 

Intrigued by rituals, symbolism and our intuitive connection to nature, Luna longs to create objects of silence that bring harmony to our daily rushed lives. Working by hand enables her to work slowly, resulting in pieces gradually emerging from her hands throughout multiple days or even weeks. Luna began her practice in 2019 and is continuing her exploration of sculptural ceramics and textile experiments in her studio in Amsterdam. The final works are unique pieces that have captured an on-going conversation between maker and material.

Liam Palmer
London
Contemporary Painting

Liam grew out of Driffield, East Yorkshire and one of his primary motivations for working with paint was to remove time and flatten the generations of family into one present.
Most of Liams work is created in London although he retreats to Athens for his larger paintings as he has access to larger spaces to work.

Liams inspirations are from people like Mamma Andersson, Peter Doig and Marcel Proust. His method of work is either working from life or from photographs or collaged compositions, trying to add symbolism, small signatures, reference points or pictures in pictures to the paintings. There is an urge to quiet scenes or objects, people/animals lost in thought or withdrawn from their surroundings.

The beginning of Liams work started around 2013 having worked in the arts for a long time and being around paintings, he wanted to give it a try.
At the time he was working at Tate and spent lunch breaks making pencil copies of the paintings in the gallery at Millbank. For a long time he was really bad but found it a fun experience and through attempting to solve the same problems the artists had been, made him see their work in a fresh light.
Flipping through styles trying to get a close to as many different thought-processes as possible and went to hundreds of exhibitions a year to get exposed to what people were experimenting with.
After seeing Mamma Andersson’s Pigeon House in a group show at Victoria Miro maybe around 2017 Liam was blown away, she had this incredible style that articulated everything Liam wanted to.
It is the magic in these moments when you find someone who has spent so much longer than you asking all the questions you want answers to, and more. It opened Liam up to a new way of working and he has been pursuing this path ever since, trying to find himself in it. 

Liam mainly paints quiet scenes or objects, he does not want a lot of dialogue, just the contemplative space we find in the silence. To allow everything to happen at the same time, compress time, overlay lives on lives, everyone at the same age at the same time. 

For Liam, painting is a meditation amongst the noise of the everyday.

Jacob Monk
London
Framed Textile Weavings

Jacob Monk is a textile artist specialising in woven textiles having trained at Central Saint Martins. His design process aims to celebrate the history and craftsmanship that goes into making an ikat fabric; the ancient tradition of creating a pattern through the binding and dyeing of the warp yarns before they are put onto the loom to be woven. 

Creating the design in this way gives the finished fabric an energetic sense of movement as it transitions from one colour to the next, with an almost hand painted quality. The hand dyed yarn is then woven on a loom, stretched and framed. Colour is an important factor in Jacob's work, as he uses bold and unconventional colour combinations, often inspired by nature, to create dramatic one-off and limited-edition pieces of contemporary artworks for the modern interior space.

Daniel Fletcher
London
Abstract paintings on canvas and paper

Daniel Fletcher is a visual artist currently living and working in London. He was born in 1993 and grew up in Hampshire before studying at Falmouth School of Art and then London College of Communication. He splits his time between working in his studio and running Foolscap Editions. Foolscap Editions is a self-started, independent publisher that works in close collaboration with emerging artists to release books and special editions.

Daniel Fletcher depicts the complexity of human expression through layers of abstract mark-making. He works intuitively, building emotive compositions from bold, darting lines and flat planes of colour. Faces are a regular occurrence throughout his work, often splintered or manic in appearance, lurking within the fabric of the painting’s compositions. His painting approach is marked by a background in fine art printing, combining a level of control and precision that screen printing lends, with the spontaneous freedom of painted and drawn marks.

Jessica Bird
London
Mixed Media Illustrations on Paper

Jessica Bird is an award-winning Scottish artist and fashion illustrator based in London. Jessica worked in the fashion industry before becoming a full time artist in 2018.

Now primarily working as a fashion illustrator Bird’s work often focusses on the moving body and capturing its brief moments of stillness. She has a talent at capturing the pace of the people and objects she draws, ensuring everything is alive through her spontaneous, improvised strokes. Working with highly pigmented paint, brightly coloured chalk pastel and willow charcoal Jessica's intuitive hand is guided by her medium, the environment of her subjects and colour.

Tejumola Butler Adenuga
London
Illustrations in Ink on Canvas

Tejumola Butler Adenuga is a Nigerian born, London based multidisciplinary artist and designer whose practice focuses on the intentional removal of informational excess through a subtle, minimalistic approach. His work fixates on the significance of clarity in content, while upholding an uncompromising attitude towards achieving technical brilliance in a minimalistic art form. Butler grasps at the purity of objects in their rawest form, depicting just how possible it is to dissect the physical personality, without eliminating the elementary aspects of allure that many contemporary individuals relate to.

Alongside his art practice, Tejumola’s vision is to create objects and spaces that channel individual identities alongside the needs of end users. His exceptional skillset revolving around design, fabrication and material knowledge means that he can meet requirements with an effective, collaborative and professional approach.

He studied Design at Ravensbourne University and has four years art directing experience for notable musician Tinie Tempah. He has also been commissioned for notable international brands such as  Adidas, Uber, New York Times, MTV VMA's, Dr. Martens, Soho House, Atlantic Magazine, Berluti, The British Fashion Council, The New Yorker, Pentagram, Citizen Magazine and LAMY As of today, over 450+ people have Butler’s work permanently tattooed on their skin. He currently lives and works in London, England.

Louisa Loakes
London
Framed Block Prints on Cloth

Louisa’s work blends elements from her fine art practice and her intuitive approach to textiles. During her time studying at Wimbledon School of Art, Louisa developed a particular interest in Abstract painting, which continues to ground and guide her work across a range of mediums.  

Working from her studio in Peckham, Louisa’s practice is focused on the beautifully simple, slow art of hand-carved block printing. Having spent many years researching the craft, she draws particular inspiration from the processes involved in traditional Indian block printing, and her practice interweaves Eastern folk art traditions with forms and patterns familiar to western languages of abstraction. As a self-taught block printer, she approaches fabric like a painting - or one of her charcoal drawings - creating delicate, twisting patterns that repeat themselves across its surface. Distinctive in their simple use of geometric form, monochromatic palette and signature dash of hand-painted colour, Louisa’s hand-carved block printed patterns are charged with a human touch, the irregularities that appear in the printing process giving each piece a distinct energy and identity.  

Cansu Ceren Ilkan
London
Abstract Paintings on Canvas

Cansu Ceren İlkan is a multi disciplinary artist who was born in Berlin and based in Istanbul.
Art has always been a big part of her life since her childhood. Besides doing abstract expressionist paintings, she also composes songs and writes poems.

In her works, she mainly focuses on feelings and instantly translates her raw emotions on canvas. Every colours and marks in her painting rely on a unique feeling and the colours are main medium of her expression. She aims to approach subconsious mind of viewer and to connect deep emotions inside their inner world with her “Alive, Deep and Hearty” works.

Duelle Studio
London /Milan
Curator / Design Studio

Duelle is an interior design duo based in London, Milan and sometimes Toronto.
Designing and delivering compelling interiors for innately inquisitive clients their unique experience, international outlook and strong aesthetic vision conspire to create dynamic spaces that are richly layered, expertly implemented and artfully curated.