DANIELLE ORCHARD: MOTHER OF GLOOM

Perrotin Tokyo is pleased to present “Mother of Gloom”, Danielle Orchard’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

September 12 – November 10, 2024

Orchard, who earned an MFA from Hunter College in New York and now works and lives in Massachusetts, specializes in traditional methods of oil painting and intentionally situates her work within an art historical lineage of figurative painting. In particular, her works reflect a clear aesthetic influence from early-twentieth century Modernist painters. The spatial flatness of Orchard’s domestic scenes acknowledge a heritage from Matisse while the monumentality of her figures echo Picasso’s and Léger’s women of the early 1920s, their thick limbs and torsos offering a sculptural heft even in their flattening.

Orchard has long paid attention to depictions of the female body that are repeated throughout art history, and she thinks in particular about “the ways in which these iconic representations alternately reflect and inform how I inhabit the world as a woman.” For this exhibition, Orchard’s subjects make the move from a female body to an explicitly maternal one, signaling larger shifts in identity and cultural perception. The maternal nude, when pictured pregnant or with a small child in tow, suddenly contains multiplicities: she is both sexual and functional, gratifying and comforting.

This exploration of shifting identities parallels recent trajectories in Orchard’s own life as she speaks to a history of pregnancy loss and infertility, followed by a successful pregnancy and birth. As in her previous work, however, Orchard mines personal experience as a jumping off point from which to consider broader questions of historical and cultural representations of female and maternal bodies.

With this new body of work, Orchard participates in a conversation about maternal representation that has been growing exponentially since the 1970s—focused not only on making visible non-sacred models of motherhood but also on conveying the nuance of maternal experience.