139. Tallulah Hutson - Reach

2026
Oil on panel box
15.2 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Signed on Verso

Tallulah Hutson is a figurative painter whose oil paintings explore surrender, ecstasy, grief, and the psychological tension between release and entrapment. Drawing on references from religious painting and devotional imagery, her work examines the relationship between contemporary experiences of music, dance, and timeless states of spiritual transcendence.

At the centre of her practice are bodies caught in moments of heightened emotion — dancing, collapsing, screaming, or resting — suspended between pleasure and despair. Using the rigorous techniques and compositional structures historically associated with scenes of spiritual significance, Hutson elevates contemporary acts of release into images charged with reverie and ambiguity. Her dancers may be lost in euphoric abandon or overwhelmed by distress; the distinction is intentionally unstable.

The colour red recurs throughout her paintings, evoking club lights, late nights, passion, danger, violence, and emotional intensity. More recently, Hutson’s work has expanded to explore the relationship between dancing bodies and sleeping bodies, considering sleep as another threshold state where comfort, grief, healing, fear, and entrapment coexist. Influenced by personal experiences of loss, her paintings increasingly examine moments where struggle and resolution exist simultaneously — the point at which the soul begins to feel the edges of the body, almost breaking free.

She completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (2024–2025), following atelier training at Charles H. Cecil Studios, Florence, Italy (2019–2021).

Her solo exhibition Flowers on the Underground was presented at the Bomb Factory Art Foundation Archway Gallery, London (2024). Selected group exhibitions include the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, London (2025) and Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle (2026); Seams & Veils: Bodies, Archives, and the Threshold of Seeing at MeSo Ventures, Dubai (2026); Between Worlds at MeSo Ventures, London (2025); RCA25 at the Royal College of Art Painting Building, London (2025); Becoming of Memory at Arts Archive London (2025); CHIASMATA at Greatorex Street, London (2025); and Rejection: When No Said Yes at Hangar Gallery, Royal College of Art, London (2025).

In 2025, Hutson was shortlisted for the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award. She was also a finalist in both the Portraiture Category and Fully From Life Category of the 16th International ARC Salon Competition in 2023.