Florence Reekie

Informed by her passionate interest in the materiality and luminosity of oil paint, Florence Reekie’s highly-detailed and delicately rendered works reimagine the role of drapery in painting, often featuring glimmering swathes of fabric, hands elegantly encased in silk gloves or flowing ribbons that have been mysteriously discarded. Rather than positioning drapery as mere staging for the figure, Reekie deploys it as the body’s veil or armour in dialogue with contemporary fashion and a complex understanding of identity and self presentation. 

By drawing attention to drapery, a long-standing yet often overlooked element of classical painting, Reekie’s work ignites discussion around identity, vanity and perception. She is interested in the way in which an individual's aesthetic presentation is socially coded, investigating the lacuna between authenticity and assimilation. In particular, she toys with the idea of ‘beauty secrets’ - hidden gestures typically associated with women’s attempts to align themselves with a certain cultural notion of beauty. 

Often utilising recycled fabrics, in particular Moire Silk, as canvas, the artist paints upon the very material she depicts thereby underlining the primacy of surface and texture within her work. By leaving traces of the fabric’s past life - seams, marks and mild stains - visible in the final piece, meanwhile, she plays with the dichotomy between decadence and frugality alluding to the central theme of her work - the space between heavily cultivated appearances and unseen realities.