HP Denham – Having Recently Come from the Interior

HP Denham

Euclid Gallery is pleased to present Having Recently Come from the Interior, a debut solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist HP Denham.

Your body, the hummingbird at the jasmine, the bacteria under your fingernails, the millipede in your bathtub – we are all bodies existing on this intricate, working Body of a planet.

Having Recently Come from the Interior showcases a decade of breadth in the artist’s sensibility and demonstrates a refinement into the joyous inquiry of what it is to be a body on this Body.

HP Denham is dedicated to the notion that humans exist as a simple unit of the Earth. Seeing herself echoed back in forms like cave speleothems, shrapnel, bugs, plant limbs and Old Masters paintings, she pulls from this trough to create imagery that reminds us of our inextricable link to Earth and one another. Denham has found that painting opens a play-space for the figure and landscape to become malleable units. At once influenced by her observations and unbeholden to representation, her paintings veer off into strange eddies that mix figuration and abstraction. Oil is chosen for its simultaneous sensuality & toxicity, its rich lineage and its inherent connection to the ground. Like a stone scab, the combination of vehicle and pigment simultaneously stores a record of marks made by the artist’s body and a record of earth’s ancient and tumultuous body.