Selina Foote, Lady with a fan, 2022. Courtesy: the artist and Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland.

Following on from On a Clear Night at The Suter in 2022, Two Rooms presents a selection of recent paintings by Selina Foote from the curated exhibition alongside new work. Here we see the artist developing her established methodological practice and introducing new compositional motifs. She continues her conversation with the art historical canon, and many of the titles in the current show (The Boating Party, Chignon and Girl Arranging her Hair) hark back to early modernism, while several are aesthetically redolent of iconic pieces by Agnes Martin.

The evocative nature of these titles has us searching the paintings for the figurative. They conjure visions of women in profile attending to their toilette or enjoying communal leisure. They also indicate another theme within the works – intimacy and fragility. While the source image may be rendered indeterminate during the painting process, a glimmer of it does linger for Foote often leaves some areas of the canvas fresh and unpainted, and in these segments, the viewer can find soft graphite traces from the initial act of translation and transcription.

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