ABOUT
Roxana Halls is a London-based painter who deploys spectacle, humour, lurid narrative and an uncanny glamour to delineate a volatile erotic and political Imaginary. Balancing a visionary extravagance with formal rigour, her paintings offer a refutation of reified class and gender tropes in scenarios ranging from the oneiric to the cinematic. The representation of women is at the centre of Halls’s practice though she rarely devises a direct portrait - models play fictional protagonists, mannequins play living women and the artist plays herself in a range of roles. Everywhere in her practice the pictorial subject is intensified, dramatised and estranged.
Intellectually, Halls is drawn to the anthropological concept of bricolage in which ideas, narratives and artefacts are constructed from the tools and materials at hand. She cites a range of influences and preoccupations: true crime; Weimar subcultures; experimental and neo-noir film; the 18th century picaresque; folk horror; the laughing figures of the Dutch Baroque; post-structural feminism; clothes, wigs and miscellaneous discarded things.
Her work has an aesthetic quality that is ravishing but not always ‘tasteful’. The paintings are characterised by artifice and charged atmospheres: many are knowingly in danger of being too much - a quality which consciously speaks to her experience of working class and queer identity.
Some paintings dramatise stillness while others freeze-frame moments of incendiary action. All evoke the visual cathexes of memory and want.
Roxana Halls' work has been exhibited widely and is held in numerous private and public collections in the UK and internationally. Her many solo exhibitions include Die Augen der Roxana Halls, her first institutional solo show at Haus Kunst Mitte in Berlin and Roxana Halls’ Tingle-Tangle at the National Theatre London. Her work was recently shown in Marlborough Gallery London’s Face to Face: a Celebration of Portraiture, and in innumberable group shows and art fairs internationally in Berlin, Miami, California and New York,
and across the UK including exhibiting at Turner Contemporary and in the R.A. Summer Show. She has been a multiple shortlisted exhibitor in the National Portrait Gallery’s annual award show, The Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize. She has curated exhibitions both solo and in collaboration, most recently at Flowers Gallery London with InFems Art Collective, of which
she is co-director. She has contributed articles for and has been featured in many leading art magazines and academic texts and she is among the subjects of P.L. Henderson’s book Unlocking Women’s Art: Pioneers, Visionaries & Radicals of Paint.
Halls has been the recipient of several awards, including the Villiers David Prize, The Discerning Eye Founder’s Purchase Prize and The Derwent Special Prize, and of an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant. She has appeared as a guest on BBC Woman’s Hour and she was recorded in conversation at her London studio for BBC Radio 4’s Only Artists and she was the featured artist of the debut episode of the BBC One series Extraordinary Portraits. She has been commissioned by Carolina Herrera for International Women’s Day, created work for BBC Arts, for theatre productions and for Disney film studios. The subjects of her portraits include fashion designer Dr Pam Hogg, Emeritus Professor John Simopoulos, designer Debbie Bliss MBE, actor Sarah Gordy MBE, Booker Prize winning novelist Howard Jacobson and Alan Grieve CBE, Chairman of the Jerwood Foundation. Her many works held in private collections include those of actor Katherine Parkinson and Luke Jennings the author of the Killing Eve novels and in the public collections of The Discerning Eye Collection and St Catherine’s College Oxford. Her portrait of Katie Tomkins - Mortuary and Post Mortem Services Manager at West Hertfordshire NHS Trust – was acquired for the permanent collection of the Science Museum London and was accessioned as part of their COVID-19 Collecting Project to represent over 15,000 Portraits for NHS Heroes worldwide. Her portrait of Horse McDonald was acquired for the permanent collection of the National Galleries of Scotland and was hung for one year in the Great Hall of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.