Skip to main content
Almine Rech

Selma Parlour

Selma Parlour's meticulous oil paintings appear as though they're drawn, dyed, or printed. Alongside her delicately-shaded bands and pencil-thin (oil-made) lines, colour is a veil (not a skin) imitating the backlit quality of the screen and ensuring that every decision is evident. The London-based artist is known for her units of luminous colour, diagrammatic space, codified illusion, haptic surfaces, and her abstract-paintings-of-photography's-installation-shot-of-abstract-painting.

Selma Parlour (British, b. 1976, Johannesburg, South Africa) received her practice-led PhD in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014. Awards include an Abbey Fellowship in Painting, the British School at Rome (2023); an Arts Council England Creative Development Award (2020); the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Artist-in-Residence Award (2018); the Sunny Dupree Family Award for a Woman Artist, the Summer Exhibition, the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); and the John Moores Painting Prize (prizewinner, 2016). Other notable awards are a runner-up award from the Arts Foundation; and Thames and Hudson’s international competition and publication ‘100 Painters of Tomorrow’ (both 2014). Solo exhibitions are: 'Yonder Cloud', Pi Artworks, London (2022); 'Warp & Weft', Dio Horia Acropolis, Athens (2022); ‘Selma Parlour’, Pi Artworks, Istanbul (2020); ‘Activities for the Abyss’, Pi Artworks, London (2019); ‘Upright Animal’, Pi Artworks, London (2018); ‘Parlour Games’, a site-specific installation with Marcelle Joseph Projects, House of St Barnabas, London (2016); ‘Paradoxes of the Flattened-out Cavity’, Dio Horia, Mykonos (2015); and ‘Selma Parlour’, MOT International, London (2012). Selected group exhibitions: 'Feeling of Light', Almine Rech, Brussels; ‘Superfice’, Coleman Projects, London; ‘Harder Edge’, Saatchi Gallery, London; ‘Selma Parlour & Yelena Popova’, Horton Gallery, New York; and New Contemporaries, ICA, London.

  • Biography

    read or download