Exhibition Information

Danielle Orchard, Woman Reading
2021 Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Oil on linen 80.6 x 130.8 x 3.2 cm | 31 3/4 x 51 1/2 x 1 1/4 inch

Danielle Orchard, The Red Studio
2021 Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Oil on linen 152.4 x 101.6 x 3.2 cm | 60 x 40 x 1 1/4 inch

Danielle Orchard, Woman on Stage
2021 Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Oil on linen 130.8 x 80.6 x 3.2 cm | 51 1/2 x 31 3/4 x 1 1/4 inch

			Perrotin is pleased to announce At the Seams, a solo exhibition by New York based artist, Danielle Orchard. This is her first show with the gallery and her first in Asia.

With their deeply saturated palettes and fragmented forms, Orchard’s paintings accomplish an impressive duality: swimming within the currents and eddies defined by modernist figurative painting, while also freely incorporating fresh contemporary narrative into her work. Her scenes—domestic and languorous in tone—depict women in repose and repeatedly ask quiet questions about viewership, voyeurism, and artistic ownership of the female form. “Men explored the formal qualities of those figures, something that wasn’t theirs,” explains Orchard in reference to her familiar modernist forebears.

The female characters within Orchard’s paintings are a combination of art historical reference, self-invention, and self-portraiture, or as the artist herself puts it, “invented muses and self-proxies.” These figures quietly perform their roles as if snapped by some hidden camera, asking the viewer to consider their own role—and also the artists—in considering the intimate scene before them. Orchard’s own coveting of the complexities of the female form thus become our own metaphorical camera lens through which to view these tableaux. In The Yellow Bathroom, a woman washes her underwear in a bathroom sink, a private moment that shows an almost unconscious and tedious reality to an act that might seem exotic in description. 

Elsewhere in The Red Studio—a wink towards Matisse’s painting The Red Room—the feeling of silent observance as the viewer is placed into a womb-like red studio apartment. Here, a woman sits on her bed, half dressed in her stockings. The room’s windows are barred, and above her an eye-like ceiling lamp. The background is dotted with personal effects, and a small toilet is visible in a small adjoining room. Here, Orchard constructs a cabinet of curiosities that is a voyeuristic panopticon on minute domestic scale.

Personal effects and objects bring elements of playful symbolism to Orchard’s work. Throughout the paintings, artifacts give clues to possible narratives both inside and outside of the frame. In one, a forlorn woman reads an unwieldy book from within her bathtub. Perched on the edge is a cut pear, and a man’s watch on a side table that may allude to an unseen lover. In other works, cigarette butts, empty martini glasses, dead flowers, and a phone lying off the hook imply emotional states, degrees of isolation, and possible anxieties.

In one notable work, Night Studio, Orchard reaches back beyond modernism towards the classical, engaging reference to the French baroque painter Georges de La Tour—noted for using directional candlelight in his religious themed works. Here, a candlelight on the bed illuminates her semi-nude subject as she works in her home studio. The scene is inspired by a trend that Orchard noted during the Covid-19 pandemic where several artists she knew faced eviction from their studios, thus working from home and on a significantly reduced scale. Like the works of La Tour, the scene’s intimacy and the light’s soft attendance suggests some form of heavenly intervention, although here it more closely resembles an artistic sense of divine inspiration. In Orchard’s work, presence is felt throughout. Ours, hers, or otherwise—we all like to watch. 
— James Casey

Danielle Orchard lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Born in Indiana in 1985, Orchard received a BFA in Painting from Indiana University and a MFA in Painting from Hunter College in New York. Nodding to the great painters of the modern era including Picasso and Matisse, Orchard’s paintings often reference their styles and subject by portraying female nudes in a more abstract manner; the figures are portrayed in multi-perspectival Analytic Cubist style or abbreviated otherwise into solid contours and saturated colors. While the concept of female nude finds itself deeply ingrained in art history as a muse and more recently being established as a subject of study, Orchard adds depth by infusing her own experiences as a female artist in the contemporary era. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at galleries in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, USA, and Copenhagen, Denmark. She has also been exhibited in various group shows and programs in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Art Basel Miami, gaining her increasing international recognition.

(Source = Perrotin)