Overview
Selma Parlour, 2022, Salon VII, 76 x 76 cm, Oil on linen
Selma Parlour, 2022, Salon VII, 76 x 76 cm, Oil on linen
'My paintings are meticulously rendered through soft films of oil on linen to look as though they are drawn, dyed or printed. My interest is in painting's in/extrinsic conventions and the technical problems of the medium. Central to my invented vocabulary are: the frame, flatness, surface, transparency, trompe l'oeil illusion, bands and units of isolated colour, repetition (with variation and displacement), frontality and the singularly-framed and fixed view, and the re-presentation of art and context.

The paintings are effectively diagrams or templates; illusion is codified through shaded bands and colour is in-laid as if through a process of marquetry. Colour is a veil (not a skin). The literal transparency of colour borrows from the white primer beneath so that colour glows as if lit from behind. This backlit quality is reminiscent of the screen and photograph. The analogue apes the digital; whilst the space of painting is imagined as a two-dimensional stage space that curtails fictive distance as it represents it.' 
- Selma Parlour
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Works
Exhibitions
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Biography
Selma Parlour @ Pi Artworks London
Selma Parlour @ Pi Artworks London
Selma Parlour, b.1976, London, lives and works in London, UK 
 
Major exhibitions include; Feeling of Light (group), Almine Rech Gallery, Brussles (2023); Climbing the Underside of the Ladder (group), cur. by EC, Jenny Hager, David Leapman, Christine Stark, Durden and Dray Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2022); Warp & Weft (solo), Dio Horia Acropolis, Athens, Greece (2022); Yonder Cloud (solo), Pi Artworks, London, UK (2022); Ode to Orlando, Marcelle Joseph Projects, Pi Artworks, London, UK (2022); Superfice, Coleman Projects, London, UK (2021); The Long Echo, Terrace Gallery, London, UK (2021); Selma Parlour (solo), Pi Artworks Istanbul, Turkey (2020); By Way of Laughter and Trembling, Durden & Ray, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Notions of Female Leadership, Dio Horia, Athens, Greece (2020); Activities for the Abyss (solo), Pi Artworks London, UK (2019); Women Imprinted, The h Club Gallery, London, UK (2019); Upright Animal (solo), cur. Sacha Craddock, Pi Artworks, London, UK (2018); Parlour Games (solo), Marcelle Joseph Projects (solo), House of St Barnabas, London (2016); Paradoxes of the Flattened-Out Cavity (solo), Dio Horia, Mykonos (2015); Selma Parlour (solo), MOT International Projects, London, UK (2012); Selma Parlour and Yelena Popova, Horton Gallery, NY, USA (2012); and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London, UK (2011). In 2014, Parlour was selected for Thames and Hudson's international competition and publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow. Parlour was granted Arts Council England Creative Development Award (2020) and the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Award (2018). She was the recipient of the Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist at the Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017) and was a Prizewinner at the John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Gallery, Liverpool (2016). Major collections include; Creative Cities Collections, Beijing and the Saatchi Gallery, London.
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