About

Daniel Pettitt is a London-based painter, whose practice incorporates works on canvas, plastic and paper. Operating within a register of allusive and speculative abstraction, he ingests an eclectic mix of visual and cultural source materials, such as everyday signage, modernist poetry, lyrical abstraction, queer slang, literary allusion and post-conceptual art. Pettitt’s works track fluctuations of index, fragment, metaphor, memory, semblance and mood as they congeal and dissolve into provisional fields and partial images. 

Daniel Pettitt was born in Brighton, UK in 1986. He studied MA Painting at The Royal College of Art (2017) and BA Fine Art at Bath Spa University (2008). His exhibition history spans over 15 years and includes shows in the UK, Europe and USA. Selected recent exhibitions include: AFTER IMAGE, Barrera Baldán Galeria, Seville (2025); Soft Semaphore, Seventeen Gallery, London (2024); Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, KARST, Plymouth; University of Brighton (2024); British Art at Albemarle in collaboration with Paul Smith Ltd, London (2023); Coat Heel Throat, Recent Activity, Birmingham (2023); Skeleton Tree, Brighton CCA (2022); A Generous Space, Hastings Contemporary (2021).

Pettitt was the Freelands Painting Fellow at the University of Brighton (2022). He was one half of the curatorial team that devised and delivered PALFREY, an independent artist-led gallery space in Oval, South London giving a platform to emerging and overlooked artists (2018 - 2021). He is active as a curator and writer and has lectured on painting at a number of UK universities. 

Works are included in a number of collections including Soho House, Bath Spa University, The Royal College of Art, Paul Smith Ltd and private collections in the Europe, Canada, USA and UK.

Daniel Pettitt, contemporary abstract painter and Royal College of Art graduate, in his London studio

 

 

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