Hélène Delprat

Hélène Delprat’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, following the announcement of joint representation with Galerie Cristophe Gaillard, is now open in Paris. Organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément, the exhibition displays a selection of new paintings, sculpture, video and installation works across both floors of the gallery. Over the past four decades, Delprat’s multifaceted practice has engaged the human condition as its focus, exploring life and death in an oeuvre that spans various mediums. After finding success for her distinctively primitive style of figurative painting between 1985 and 1995, following her residency at the prestigious Villa Medici in Rome, Delprat turned her focus to video, theater, interviews, installations and projects for radio, all whilst continuing to paint.

Likened to an iconologist, she distils eclectic sources of inspiration into an expansive inventory—a world both fortuitous and deliberate, beautiful and grotesque, where themes of memory, identity, recording and legacy coalesce to remind us that the past is a construction and the present is fleeting. ‘Intellectually, I start from everything I see’ she says, ‘… there is no real prep work, except all this reading, all these curiosities, the newspapers I flick through, the programmes I listen to and all the photos that I take or cut out. The preparation is simply what I am living.’

It is this prevailing characteristic of presenting comedy alongside a multitude of artistic, literary and philosophical references that counterbalances the presence of dark and sinister symbology in her work. Layers of abstract textures where semi-hidden images of phantasmagorical forms, such as ghouls or anthropomorphized moths, coexist are exemplified in works such as ‘Peinture – catastrophe’ (2023), composed of pigments binding acrylic and glitter on canvas, a technique frequently employed by Delprat.

A new series of carpets made by Delprat, installed on the first floor, are covered in graphic patterns resembling the ornamental coverings of shop fronts used to protect from bombings in Paris during the First World War, employed to further evoke the spectacle of war. Similar imagery evoking tragedy and death appears in ‘Judas’ (2023), a painting on paper stretched over canvas which shows a figure hanging from a noose, his body pouring with entrails, alongside a threatening winged creature, taking inspiration from a painting by Giovanni Canavesio at the Chapelle Notre Dame des Fontaines in Paris.

Delprat’s artistic output remains consistently rooted in her infinite curiosity for gathering information from the world before and around her. More recently, this approach is exemplified in filmic works such as ‘HAMMER SONG’ (2023), where the artist recreates scenes and imagery from films produced by Universal or Hammer. Executed in a DIY manner within her studio, the work forms a playful tribute to Z movies, playing on archetypical cinematic tropes such as lightning, flying saucers, storms, screams, monsters and giant spiders. As the artist says, ‘I like things that are rugged, in discord, a bit monstrous or extravagant.’