Delphine Hennelly:Through Perseus’ Shield

Huxley-Parlour are delighted to present Through Perseus’ Shield – Delphine Hennelly’s first solo exhibition in the UK – at their Maddox Street gallery. In seven large-scale canvases, Hennelly renders monumental figures in a prismatic palette and heavily wrought, impasto brushstrokes. The exhibition reappropriates the art-historical motif of the mirror as a symbol of self-assured, modern womanhood.

Mining existent cultural and historical imagery, Hennelly’s practice is characterised by her use of repetition. Each canvas is realised in its own seductive colour palette, yet at the centre of each composition lies the same motif, woman with mirror, which Hennelly uses as a conceptual and formal structure from which to play out variables. Hennelly uses repetition in this way as a kind of artistic echolalia, with each canvas informing the next in a cyclical, self-referential loop, influenced by the writings of Gilles Deleuze.

The title of the exhibition, Through Perseus’ Shield, is the title of the first painting in the suite of seven: a kaleidoscopic reworking of a 1485 painting by Hans Memling entitled ‘Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation’. The painting crucially reveals the art-historical inception of the project, as Hennelly takes the personification of sinful vanity – a young woman regarding her own reflection – as her point of departure. Hennelly reconfigures and reimagines this objectified female form in order to, as she states, ‘emancipate’ it.