Alice Delhanty: Invented Fire
Tache is pleased to announce Invented Fire, a solo exhibition of new paintings by artist Alice Delhanty (b. 2001, United Kingdom) on view from 25 September through 29 October 2026.
The point of origin for this body of fifteen works was New Zealand, where Delhanty filled books with plein air gouaches, watercolours and charcoal sketches. The consequent canvases are charged with a vast sense of landscape, the vigor of hot climate and the turbulence of shifting weather – they are ablaze with the literal and metaphorical light for which the exhibition is named.
Delhanty’s paintings express forms caught at different temperatures. Veils of translucent, icy blue and sunbleached yellow shroud the elegant lines of Parasol, whilst Lapse and Tattoo erupt with saturated, physical brushwork in fuchsia. Some shapes appear on the verge of crystallising and others melt into one another, as if miraged by high-summer heatstroke.
The title Invented Fire is pulled from a Guillaume Apollinaire essay on the human and artistic proclivity toward light. Something everpresent, all-surrounding, even elemental, is transfigured only by the human hand. Delhanty practices the same two-fold layering of experience: the first taking place in the natural world, and the second within the act of painterly creation itself. Informed by the artistic processes of Prunella Clough and Susan Rothenberg, initial acts of automatism are generative of figuration and palette in Delhanty’s works. Compositions flow across three-metre canvases, with boats, bathers and their swimsuits emerging through layers of colour and sprays of mirrored tiles.
Travel, as the repositioning of oneself and its potential to bring about the sublime, is foundational to Delhanty’s work as a contemporary abstractionist: her exploration of gestural markmaking and its relationship with the physicalities of paint and of surface; her handling of colour as material and as sign. In Delhanty’s words, her works call forth “a haptic visual response, closing the circle between my hand, the surface, and the eye.” They are “developing objects” becoming, in the present exhibition, “totalised expressions”.
An essay by Anna Moss accompanies the exhibition, as does a catalogue published by the gallery.
