Leo Arnold

Leo Arnold (1993, London, UK) lives and works in London and Amsterdam. Arnold makes paintings intuitively, without a fixed plan: mistake, accident and doubt are fundamental to their development, with painterly discovery, rather than resolution, as the engine of each work. His process is cumulative and physical, involving repeated reworking that leaves the surface as a palimpsest of stymied solutions and revised intentions. Colour emerges through distillation, guided by emotion rather than system. The resulting works carry a quality of vulnerable self-parody: a hesitant, at times awkward attempt to locate oneself within a reality only partially understood. Things remain fragmentary; gestures unfinished; faces blurred or withheld. This continuous circling around something that resists being grasped is not a failure of the work but its condition.

Arnold frequently returns to singular subjects, his immediate surroundings, reflective surfaces, the landscape seen from a moving train, producing multiple works from the same motif, each one slightly different, each one reopening the question. As he has said of painting: "it's a bit like dancing — I don't consciously think about the steps, it just comes through my fingers." 

Arnold studied at the Glasgow School of Art, where he received a BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking with First Class honours (2011–2015), before completing a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam (2018–2020). He won the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst in 2019 and the Buning Brongers Prijs in 2020.

Solo exhibitions include Autumn Journal, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2026); Saccades, Burnette Coleman, London (2025); Dweller, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2022); Glass Houses, McBeans, East Sussex (2021); All In Green My Love Went Riding, Giardino dello Zuccaro, Venice (2018); Making Flippy Floppy, 89a Torbay Road, London (2017); Pendolino, New Glasgow Society, Glasgow (2016); and GLOMA: MONO, Espacio Urg3l, Madrid (2015).

Group exhibitions include Paintings and Polaroids, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2025); Dancing with Octopuses, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2022); Buning Brongers Prize, Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2020); The O spring, De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2020); Koninklijke Prijs Voor Vrije Schilderkunst 2019, Royal Palace, Amsterdam (2019); Desire Lines, Light Eye Mind, London (2017); Art Cabinets, Stua, Madrid (2016); New Scottish Artists, DRAF, London (2015); and RSA New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy Galleries, Edinburgh (2015).

His work is held in the collections of Stichting Kunst & Historisch Bezit ABN AMRO, Rabo Art Collection, and ING Bank Collection.