Born in London 1983, Anglo-Palestinian contemporary artist Lubna Speitan, showcases her distinctive and instantly recognisable style in galleries and exhibitions across London. Winner of Art Gemini Prize 2018 for best painting, featured in The Londonist, Art Culture Magazine, Talented Art Fair, Sussex Art Fair 2021, FLUX Greenwich Design District 2021/22, top 20 artists Secret Art Prize 2019, Westcombe News, London Art Guide and shortlisted for The Cult House, Bridgeman Art Award and Ashhurst Prize. Lubna continues to develop and establish her full-time career as an emerging artist

 

Working predominantly in oils and acrylics she has developed her practice in painting, drawing and printmaking, producing landscapes, portraits and abstracts. Most distinctive, however, are her award-winning monochrome nightscape paintings of London; capturing the enigmatic uncanniness of nights in the City

 

Lubna’s ink drawings and nightscape paintings, built from multiple layers of carefully blended paints, shimmering in the darkness. Painted freehand, without grids or guides she captures nights in the City; nights lit by brittle halogen, icy headlights, reflected street signs, and the sheen of rainwater. The carefully blended range of matt colours create the elusive and reflective tones of the City at night, with subtle variants of greys and whites picking out contemporary landmarks from a deserted train station to the London Eye

 

These scenes are full of secrets, hinting at the stories that unfold through London’s long nights. This is a hidden London: the city of those who live on the streets, the friendless, the outsiders. The paintings reveal the loneliness that looms over London in the dead of night – a loneliness that nevertheless connects us as human beings, and which is tenderly embraced in this work. Inspired by periods of insomnia, Lubna has calmly observed the interplay of darkness and illumination, and invites viewers to share the mystery of these deep and fleeting spaces

 

Lubna Speitan has a BA in Graphic Design and is member of the Blackheath Art Society. In addition to painting, Lubna is passionate about writing, poetry, music, philosophy, ethics, psychology and anthropology as well as political activism, championing environmentalism and the rights of minorities and the dispossessed. This is reflected in a new body of work to raise awareness on disability issues as well as in her humorous political prints

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“With a little imagination we can travel great lengths”

 

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