Elizabeth Abel

Elizabeth Abel (b. 2001) is a London-based painter whose abstract work is driven by instinct, memory, and emotional residue. Her practice is rooted in a process of excavation—unearthing sensations, fragments, and forms that trace human presence and absence. She works quickly and intuitively, building compositions where color, line, and form collide and dissolve. Colors are chosen instinctively. Red meets blue, soft washes cover sharp gestures, and marks are both made and mended. Her paintings hold tension—between presence and absence, between intimacy and distance, between clarity and collapse.

Abel's work explores the human form as an open, ambiguous structure—sometimes figural, sometimes fading into near-complete abstraction. Themes of sexuality, nostalgia, and transformation echo run through her surfaces. Her process is cathartic, a physical release, allowing emotion to guide the hand. What emerges is not a finished narrative but a field in flux: layers of thought and sensation, structure and collapse, presence and erasure. Abel’s work invites the viewer into this search-into a space where emotions become form, and where the human body becomes something ancient, open, and ever-transforming.

Abel received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2023, following a BFA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Metamorphosis at Ronchini Gallery, London (2025), and Bloomed at Noh-art Residency, Naples (2023). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions including the RCA MA Painting Degree Show (2023), Haven at Steingold Contemporary (2022), and the Slade Degree Show (2022).