Delphine Hennelly’s work addresses the human condition and prescribed gender roles through her use of pattern, repetition, and uncanny colour palettes. Reminiscent of silk ribbons or powdery tufted upholstery, Hennelly’s paintings extend her longstanding interest in color as a way to create atmosphere and mood. Whether suggestive of foggy full-moon nights or drizzly afternoons with storm clouds on the horizon, the color palettes of her works reflect moments in time that are neither turbulent nor fully calm.
Her work is particularly inspired by tapestries, art history, and early modernism, which she references through motifs, compositional structures and gestures. Some of Hennelly’s figures are modelled after the ones in popular eighteenth-century “boudoir paintings,” whose sensual qualities Hennelly amplifies. They sink into luxurious piles of bedding or into the folds of rich,
satiny garments.
Hennelly works in series, exploring the same motif as an act of repetition, influenced by the writing of Giles Deleuze and the notion of continuous time and the conflation of the past and the future with the present.
Hennelly (b. 1979) received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2002 and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Visual Arts at Rutgers University in 2017. She is the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award and her work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe and Canada. Her work has appeared in nume-rous publications including ArtMaze Magazine, Nut Publication, and New American Paintings. In 2022, Hennelly was a resident artist of Palazzo Monti (Brescia).
She lives and works in Montréal.