Meet the Artist
Amel Karboul is an abstract contemporary artist and curator of human gatherings whose interdisciplinary practice spans painting, installation, writing, and embodied social ritual. Her work explores the emotional terrains of resilience, dissent, lineage, grief, and becoming-territories where personal experience and collective memory intersect. Trained as a dancer before entering public leadership, Amel brings a highly developed sense of rhythm, movement, and embodied intelligence to her visual and relational work. Her compositions are gestural, layered, and luminous, operating not as representations but as reverberations of lived experience.
In her current series, 2425, she engages the psychic aftermath of rupture and conflict, creating paintings that carry the subtle pulse of resilience and the emotional residue of a world in flux.
Parallel to her studio practice, Amel is internationally recognized as a curator of human gatherings, designing transformative spaces where people connect with deeper parts of themselves and with one another. Since 1997, she has shaped encounters across continents and contexts-political summits, artistic salons, philanthropic circles, leadership retreats, community healing spaces, and intimate domestic environments. Her gatherings blend ritual, story, sensory design, and silence to cultivate presence, trust, and collective reflection.
In this way, the curatorial and the visual are inseparable: both are inquiries into how transformation happens-individually and together.
Born in Tunisia and shaped by a life across Germany and the UK, Amel’s work is informed by Mediterranean sensibility, systems thinking, and spiritual practice. Her practice is grounded in attentiveness to bodies, spaces, memories, and emotional thresholds, and is sustained by a belief that art can hold what is fragile, complex, or unspeakable.
Through Studio Amel, she brings together painting, narrative, and the choreography of human connection into a single evolving practice. This work is not a departure from her earlier leadership career but its deeper current-the through-line that has always shaped how she sees, senses, and intervenes in the world.
Selected Exhibitions, Residencies, Training & Open Calls
2025
Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency, Bellagio, Italy
BEYOND THE HORIZON: Collective Perspectives - Group Exhibition, London
Royal College of Art - Curating Contemporary Art & Design: Theory and Practice, London
Shortlisted: Cabinet of Curiosity No.2 - Cody Dock Commission, GASWORKS Dock Partnership, London
Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency, Bellagio, Italy
BEYOND THE HORIZON: Collective Perspectives - Group Exhibition, London
Royal College of Art - Curating Contemporary Art & Design: Theory and Practice, London
Shortlisted: Cabinet of Curiosity No.2 - Cody Dock Commission, GASWORKS Dock Partnership, London
Artist Statement
My work explores the emotional terrain of movement, resilience, and transformation-what it means to live through rupture and still find form. Rooted in my early training as a dancer, my practice is driven by gesture: bold shapes, fluid textures, and shifts in rhythm that evoke motion, tension, and release. Colour becomes a language of contrast-light against shadow, fragility against force-mirroring the oscillations of inner experience.
My recent series, 2425, emerged during a period marked by personal and global grief: the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and a series of personal health crises. These works are not depictions of events, but reverberations of that time-intuitive compositions that hold fragility, disappearance, and the subtle pulse of resilience. Some paintings came through silence; others through physical weakness or spiritual stillness. Each carries the imprint of a world struggling to hold itself together.
Alongside my studio practice, I work as a curator of human gatherings, designing spaces where people connect with deeper parts of themselves and with one another. Since 1997, I have shaped encounters across continents and contexts-political summits, artistic salons, retreats, philanthropic circles, and intimate kitchen rituals. These gatherings draw on the same sensibility as my visual work: an attentiveness to movement, energy, and emotional thresholds; a belief in the transformative potential of presence; and a commitment to creating spaces where meaning can surface organically.
Living across Tunisia, Germany, and Britain has given me a sensibility that is both rooted and borderless. My materials-acrylic, watercolour, and increasingly oil-allow me to explore the tension between precision and spontaneity. My process is shaped by mindfulness and spiritual practice, inviting stillness into each layer and allowing the work to emerge rather than be imposed.
At its core, my practice is a search: for motion, for meaning, and for the quiet moments in which new forms of connection-internal or collective-become possible. I believe art can hold what is unspeakable, and sometimes help us name it.
For studio inquiries, commissions and collaborations.
To follow Amel...