ARTIST FEATURE - LADY GABE

ARTIST | FEATURE

LADY GABE

Hannah Gabriel is a self-taught painter, muralist and illustrator based in Cheltenham and known as Lady Gabe. Her artworks fizz with bold colour, high energy, deep details and a playful sense of abandon. Using painting as a sense of escape and emotional release, Hannah's artworks explore movement and emotion through abstraction, inviting viewers to connect and to feel alongside her.

With a background in digital illustration, Lady Gabe has a fine-tuned understanding of how to build and layer narrative and connection, which she has been abstracting and playing with, bringing it into her painting since the pandemic in 2020. Returning to painting and beginning an instinctive, emotionally driven season to her practice, she uses paint to process inner landscapes and lean into the "too much".

Lady Gabe's practice is one deeply rooted in finding and sharing joy. It doesn't shy away from deeper, painful emotions, but explores, processes, and translates them into wild, beautiful expressions of joyful colour. She finds ways to connect with her viewers, inviting them in to experience something alongside her, whether it's understanding or learning, a thought being opened up or reflected, it's all about feeling.

Expressing her neurodivergence, Lady Gabe's work comes from a place of exploration of her Synesthesia. Emotions are intensely sensory to Hannah; they have colour, shape, and form. Sound is tangible, and forms shapes, and songs inspire a lot of her work. Memories too attach themselves to shapes or numbers, allowing her to access them through a navigable web of connections in her mind. Whether it's her large-scale murals or smaller abstract paintings, through her expressive mark-making and fluid use of colour, she delves into these vaults of sensory information to reflect her personal experiences.

Embracing the physicality of painting, with bold marks, dynamic and brush work and energetic use of colour, Lady Gabe's pieces are a celebration of what it is to be human and to feel. They connect with her audience through their authenticity and deeply vulnerable honesty. Her pieces are loud, unapologetic and at times chaotic, all of which reflect an artist releasing the fear of expressing themselves and boldly echoing the world around them in all its messy feels.

After her first solo exhibition at Sixteen Gallery in February, we caught up with Lady Gabe to talk all about preparing for an exhibition – to find out more about the work and how she brought the show together, follow this link. And find more of her work and where to connect with her, head over to her portfolio below

VIEW LADY GABE'S PORTFOLIO