Somaya Critchlow: The Chamber

Critchlow’s six sombrely sexy paintings respond to European painting from the 17th and 18th centuries, asking us to look and look again

Somaya Critchlow, The Chamber II, 2024 (detail). Oil on linen, 115 x 90 cm. © Somaya Critchlow. Courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
4 February – 20 July 2025

by TOM DENMAN

It wasn’t long ago that I made a pact with myself never to see a painting exhibition, with the intention of reviewing it, with a painter. I did this once and almost bailed out of the commission. My friend’s insights into how things were done, the flourishes, the touches, were too interesting to ignore – more interesting, I felt, than anything I had to say, precisely because he was pointing things out that were indetectable to me. Reviewing Somaya Critchlow’s show in one of the smaller rooms at Dulwich Picture Gallery – a museum dedicated to European painting mainly from the 17th and 18th centuries – brings to mind this pact. I am not exactly breaking it – I have come to the show alone – but I am reminded of it because Critchlow’s work is making me see things in the museum’s collection that I would not pick up on otherwise. The exhibition comprises six paintings Critchlow has made with the museum’s collection in mind, and with the intention, it seems, of encouraging us to consider the collection afresh – or to consider the extent to which contemporary art deeply invested in art of the past (let’s please not call it old masters) can refresh and renew our view of it.

Gerrit Dou, A Woman Playing a Clavichord, c1665. Oil on oak panel, 37.7 x 29.9 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

On arriving, I dare say I am a little daunted, and not for the reason I have just described. Sharing the wall with a painting by Gerrit Dou of A Woman Playing a Clavichord (c1665) – the pulled-back curtain drawing me in, so I imaginarily enter the scene of intrigue, complete with a suggestively curvaceous viola da gamba – a Fragonard of a courtesanish “fantasy figure” and a couple of drunks by Teniers, is a single-framed diptych of tiny canvases within a berry-red mountboard. The only way of looking at Critchlow’s Study for Venus (2024) and Bride (2024) is up close – there is no way of hiding the way I am leaning into the works, both of which depict naked women, one with a wild-eyed smile, the other with her limbs vulnerably splayed.

Left: Somaya Critchlow, Study for Venus, 2024.Oil on linen, 10 x 7 cm. Right: Somaya Critchlow, Bride, 2024. Oil on linen, 10 x 7 cm. © Somaya Critchlow. Courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London. Installation view, Somaya Critchlow, The Chamber, Dulwich Picture Gallery 2025. Photo: Prudence Cuming.

There is a sombre sexiness to Critchlow’s paintings, which are dominated by a deep ruddy undertone that envelops you in their illusory spaces – their “boudoirs” – and emanates warmth from the naked or semi-naked bodies that populate them. I begin to feel more than a little embarrassed. I look about the room to see if anyone can see me looking at the works the way I am. I feel scrutinised, even though it is me who is technically doing the scrutinising.

What happens when art encourages you to look at it and to look away – or rather, when it encourages those who feel implicated by their own gaze to look, and then look away? Should I be locked out of “The Chamber” of the exhibition’s title? It would be fair enough if I was, in some ways, given that art institutions have for so long been geared to a white male audience. But I am not sure Critchlow really wants her viewership to be so circumscribed. Her paintings are being shown in a museum whose collection is made up of white, mostly male European artists who flourished when anti-Black violence buttressed empires and their economies. And yet Critchlow has gleaned much of her technical knowledge directly from the works in the museum’s collection. It would be crudely simplistic to say that her main aim is to offer a riposte to canonical art history (although her presence at Dulwich manifests an important one), as it would be to say she is blindly imitating it. Her boundary-crossing art hovers somewhere on the threshold of critique and appreciation, raising more questions than it answers – which is why I must return to that feeling, my self-awareness that prevents me from taking my gaze for granted.

After Titian, Europa and the Bull, 17th century. Oil on canvas, 46.7 x 57.1 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

The wall text tells us that the title comes from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979), the titular story of a collection of fairytales reworked through a feminist lens, the reference alluding to Critchlow’s own referencing of a more distant past (the tale itself is about the bride of a Sadean marquis, who owns a collection of erotic paintings). Critchlow’s silken brushwork may remind us of mid-20th-century airbrushed pinup photography or illustration, or “soft pornography”, but it also recalls Titian’s famous mythological scenes, such his Europa and the Bull (1560-62) (a scene of abduction that also resonates with Carter’s story), a 17th-century copy of which is hung here, its foaming water echoed in the woman’s white negligee in Critchlow’s The Chamber II (2024). Her application of techniques traditionally associated with high art to a low aesthetic does more than draw into question long dismantled hierarchies. The digital screen – perhaps by the very nature of it being a screen, as well as the way it flattens any painterly nuance – misrepresents her work as pornographic. Seen in person, on the other hand, the erotics of Critchlow’s subject and her supple brushwork enter a kind of dance: merging as one, then separating – so that, for a moment at least, I believe I am admiring the surface of her work irrespective of his subject – then merging again, sustaining the attention and deepening our encounter.

Somaya Critchlow, The Chamber I, 2024. Oil on linen, 95 x 65 cm. © Somaya Critchlow. Courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

In The Chamber I (2024), a woman stands in front of a mirror, holding her breasts in her hands. She is shown frontally and from behind, while the presence of the mirror recalls its iconographic use in Renaissance and baroque art as an emblem of feminine beauty – such as in the National Gallery’s comparably provocative Rokeby Venus (1647-51) by Diego Velázquez, an artist who considered himself an inheritor of Titian’s impressionistic late style. Critchlow’s subtle rippling of light on skin, and the fuzzy veiling that separates the world of the mirror from that of the chamber, and both from us, accentuate the image’s languid eroticism. Looking at Critchlow and thinking about Titian – an artist I have loved since seeing his Diana and Actaeon (1556-1559) and Diana and Callisto (1556-1559) at the Scottish National Gallery as an undergraduate – I realise it had not occurred to me that his swishy, gossamer brushstrokes could be seen to synecdochally correspond with the eroticism of his subjects. Or at least I have not been able to verbalise this until viewing his work, in my mind’s eye, through Critchlow’s lens.

Somaya Critchlow, Twisted Figure, 2024. Oil on linen, 80.5 x 60.1 cm. © Somaya Critchlow. Courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

The presence of Critchlow’s paintings at Dulwich opens up myriad associations with works from the period of European art history the museum represents, and the direct connections the exhibition makes – through the inclusion of works from the collection as well as drawings Critchlow made of some of them – prompt an expansive response rather than pin individual works to particular sources. Her Twisted Figure (2024), in which a woman kneels on a chair with her buttocks splayed before us, turning her head to meet our gaze, instantly reminds me of Caravaggio’s erotically charged Musicians (c1595) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which he included his own remarkably similar face looking out at us in much the same way. Walking through the museum after seeing Critchlow’s exhibition, as is my wont, I stop at Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian (c1630-35), and I notice the way he is similarly contorted, except Reni shows his subject frontally, with his hands bound to the tree behind him. Then I see something I am certain I had not noticed before – that the beautiful saint and queer icon looks as if he is being penetrated from behind, deepening the eroticism of his ecstasy. Maybe Critchlow is asking me to look, look away, look again.