Madeleine Pfull standing beside a painting titled "The Woman Who Was Abducted by Aliens" from her exhibition "Disturbances". Photograph courtesy of Chalk Horse. Madeleine Pfull’s first solo exhibition at Chalk Horse Gallery in 2019 set a strong precedent for her future work. The show featured eight paintings exploring themes of domesticity and suburban life, depicting women in their most natural states. Set during the 1980s, these women were captured doing everyday activities like reading a novel by the pool and eating a biscuit in the living room.
In her second solo exhibition at the same gallery in 2021, Pfull shifted focus from suburban housewives to working-class women. The detailed expressions and everyday scenes in these portraits underscored a subtle humour, which was soon recognised as a signature element in Pfull’s work. These exhibitions cemented her reputation for creating evocative and distinctive portrait paintings.
Her latest exhibition titled “Disturbances” at Chalk Horse Gallery, continues an exploration of these themes across 18 distinct paintings, challenging herself with a series of “scary” artworks. Evoking both fear and humour presents a unique challenge in oil painting, where the medium doesn’t immediately seize the viewer’s attention. To address this, Pfull employs her signature approach, through boggle-eyed faces conveying surprise or monstrous grimaces to evoke a lingering sense of unease rather than overt horror. In “Disturbances”, and the exhibitions that have come before, she confronts the inherent limitations of painting while leveraging its strengths, creating works that resonate deeply through meticulously crafted surfaces and underlying tension.
