Meet the Artist: Roxana Halls
Roxana Halls' work has been exhibited widely and is held in numerous private and public collections in the UK and internationally. Frequently employing dark glamour and a wry deliberate humour, Halls’ paintings depicting female impropriety offer a riposte to self-censure. Halls is drawn to investigate the meaning of cultural trends and invites the viewer to reflect on the interplay of gender, class, sexuality and spectatorship.
Halls has held numerous solo exhibitions including her first institutional solo presentation at Haus Kunst Mitte museum, Berlin in 2023, at The National Theatre, Beaux Arts Bath Gallery and Hayhill Gallery, Mayfair. Her work has been included in numerous group shows worldwide, most recently in Face to Face: A Celebration of Portraiture at Marlborough Gallery, London, Lost Girls, Flowers Gallery, London, with TW Fine Art in Palm Beach, Florida & Brooklyn, NY, the BP Portrait Award, The RA Summer Exhibition, The Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Competition. She has been invited on three occasions to exhibit work at The Discerning Eye exhibition.
She has created works commissioned by and for Arts Council England funded exhibitions and supported museum and touring shows including Kapow! held at Stoke Potteries Museum and Dear Christine which toured the UK in 2019 and 2020. She has also curated exhibitions including Lost Girls at Flower's Gallery, London with InFems Art Collective in 2023 and Funny Ha Ha with Maddox Gallery in 2022. Halls has been the recipient of several awards, including the Villiers David Prize, The Discerning Eye Founder's Purchase Prize, The Derwent Special Prize and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award.
8. Roxana Halls - Laughing Head - Red Shades
Would you consider laughter a radical tool of resistance?
Laughter itself is a rebellious eruption from the body, an uncontainable force, disruptive and often described as 'inappropriate'. It can be the very thing that cuts through to the truth, which cannot be policed or supressed despite all attempts. When I paint images depicting female pleasure, excessiveness or impropriety I think of Hélène Cixous, her ideas and stories. She shows us how resistance can take so many forms - the cultural prohibitions on women being so numerous. I've always thought of wild uncontained laughter as having a palpable eroticism, and I often describe these unbounded, often queer women in my paintings as erotic agents of change.
As Audre Lorde writes in her 1978 essay 'Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power':
"As women we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge...The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings... Of course, women so empowered are dangerous."
Do you often paint from life, do you engineer reference photos, what’s your process pre-painting?
I don't plan my pictures as such: they come to me unbidden, flashing into my mind formed whole as if stilled scenes from a film. My role then is to commit that image to canvas, which can sometimes involve a convoluted process of staging. I start from the guiding principle that I will do whatever is necessary to make the image in my mind exist, and I've been known to build whole sets for my models to work within.
Agency and collaboration are a vital element of the work so I mostly work with actors because the process I deploy is so performative and requires physical awareness and a capacity for unrestraint.
What energizes you in your creative practice?
Well it's always true that making work creates work so when you're in a state of 'flow' you always keep that motor running. In the act of painting I generally listen to music and some pictures really have their own soundtrack which is part of their rhythm. New thoughts and schemes can detonate at the most unexpected moment and I keep a list, titled KEIME, with me to hand at all times to keep notes. I'm an avid cineaste and I go to the movies at least twice a week and wear out my MUBI subscription so that's a vital source and so much is generated by seeing other artists work.
Painting is such as solitary activity and that suits my nature, however I'm greatly energised by the people I work with; by models - my partners-in-crime - or with other artists and galleries if I'm working on a curatorial project.
You’re stranded on a dessert island, what five tubes of paint are you taking with you?
What a great and tricky question!
Warm White
Cadmium Yellow
Cadmium Red
Ultramarine Blue
Manganese Violet
