Selma Parlour: Selma Parlour

Pi Artworks Istanbul is pleased to announce the London-based and award-winning artist Selma Parlour’s first solo exhibition in Istanbul.

Selma Parlour is known for her meticulously rendered oil paintings that appear as though they're drawn or printed. Her invented coda to historic abstract painting and minimalism reassesses in/extrinsic conventions from a contemporary perspective. This is the London-based award-winning artist’s first solo exhibition at Pi Artworks Istanbul and includes examples of her characteristic units of luminous colour, delicately shaded bands, diagrammatic space, and her haptic surfaces.

Centre stage are three paintings from Parlour’s new series Mirror. Here two stacked fictive alcove spaces have had some of their sides erased, bringing the illusion of depth into question. The artist’s refined application and restricted palette recalls pencil shading and polished metal. Parlour states:

“The emphasis is on doubling. And I think of them as machines, but the polished metal effect isn’t the thing, rather it’s how to convey reflected light, I’m bouncing light around. My suspended shapes and missing boundaries alter what we perceive. The back edge of a box space becomes a horizon line and then quicksand. A rectangle with perspective is a trapezium. I’m fixated on our switch of cognition: That we see flatness or illusion but not at the same time.”

Parlour’s Smack Dab series of small paintings are also poised with the potential to morph. An English language expression meaning exactly or directly ‘smack dab in the middle’ implies that something is in the way. Suggestive of shaped canvases or fragments of stained glass, these compact paintings catalogue Parlour’s distinct pictorial vocabulary.

In some works, Parlour has used a laser-engraving machine put into service to remove miniscule incremental degrees of white primed surface, thus creating subtle tonal variations of primer, and finally revealing the actual raw linen surface within/beneath. In the playful Miniaturised Minimalism series, identical mock salon hangs of laser-made ‘paintings’ (floating rectangles) provide a fixed starting point across each canvas ready for varied oil-made compositions of fictitious gallery displays.

Selma Parlour, b.1976 London, lives and works in London, UK. Selected exhibitions include; Activities for the Abyss (solo), Pi Artworks London, UK (2019); Upright Animal (solo), curated by Sacha Craddock, Pi Artworks London, UK (2018); Parlour Games (solo), Marcelle Joseph Projects, House of St Barnabas, London, UK (2016); Paradoxes of the Flattened-Out Cavity (solo), Dio Horia, Island of Mykonos, Greece (2015); Selma Parlour (solo), MOT International Projects, London, UK (2012); Selma Parlour, duo with 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 the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Award (2018) and Arts Council England Creative Development Award (2020). She was also 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 Prize winner at the John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Gallery, Liverpool (2016). She will be participating ISCP residency program in New York in 2021.