Daniel Cabrillos Jacobsen is a Danish–Filipino artist, born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark. He earned a BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2023. In 2024, he was nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting at the Royal Palace Amsterdam—one of the Netherlands’ most prestigious prizes for emerging painters. He is currently based in Atlanta, pursuing an MFA at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University.
Deeply influenced by his mother’s migration from the Philippines to Denmark at the age of 30, Cabrillos Jacobsen’s practice is rooted in painting and reflects a sustained inquiry into cultural contrast, identity, and belonging. He uses the medium as a tool for storytelling, reflection, and self-exploration. His paintings often navigate memory and identity with a rhythm that blends playfulness and melancholy. Cabrillos Jacobsen builds his compositions through layered applications of paint—scraping, revising, repainting—allowing time and remembrance to take form through surface and texture. These layered, tactile works become quiet, contemplative spaces: personal responses to the complexities of the present. A sense of in-betweenness lies at the heart of Cabrillos Jacobsen’s work: interior and exterior, presence and absence, the seen and the felt. His paintings often weave together fragmented narratives drawn from personal history, cultural memory, and the spaces that connect them.
Recent exhibitions include Moonlight Bunny Napping, Durst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague, NL; Holiday Activation, Echo Contemporary, Atlanta, US; Act II: The Observatory, Ombrella, Copenhagen, DK; and Royal Award for Modern Painting, Royal Palace Amsterdam, NL. His work is held in both private and public collections, including the AkzoNobel Art Foundation and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Art Collection. He is represented by Durst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague, NL.